Sunday, June 29, 2008
Week 5, Blog #1
In Chapter 9, the concept of empowerment and its relationship to leadership is discussed. I agree with the authors that empowerment enables and motivates employees “by building feelings of self-efficacy” (Eisenberg et al., 2007, pp. 292-293). In a previous entry, I talked about how empowered I felt when a supervisor gave me pop quizzes to help my growth and development within the organization. Empowerment is the kind of leadership quality I try instilling among staff in my organizational unit, and I am hopeful that it has had as much of a positive effect on others as it has on me. I’ve also had the misfortune (this is a relative term, because I believe you can learn a lot from these experiences too) of being micro-managed by supervisors who second-guess much of my (and others’) work. While I can appreciate a leader who wants to be engaged with his/her staff, if one goes overboard with this, it can lead to an increasing sense of distrust among employees – never an effective result if one is trying to achieve successful organizational communication.
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4 comments:
I totally agree! Empowerment is a great way to learn and further your career. I am still very young so the only corporate companies I have ever worked for were restaurants. At that level of a corporation the managers tend to micromanage and it definately leads to distrust among the employees. For example in one restaurant we had a very young female manager. She should have kept her work life and personal life separate from her job instead she incorporated the two. She would hang out with employees outside of work. This caused the employees to have little or no repsect for her and after awhile no one trusted her because she was alwyas trying to be our firends but thenshe would get us in trouble at work.
Well said. Empowerment can often be the difference between an effective, hard-working employee and a discontented, ineffective one. My greatest experiences at work have been when I was given more responsibility than my title commanded and allowed the opportunity to implement my own ideas. My experience with ineffective micromanagers has been much the same as your own. I have found that managers who micromanage often do so because they do not trust their own work product. This type of projecting leads to a distrustful work environment and can actually muddy the organizational goals.
I agree with your notion of empowerment. I feel that the idea of empowerment provides a two sided relationship where the supervisor is charged with making sure that the employee is trained and equipped to carry out their assigned task. I also like the fact that empowerment also makes the employee think out of the box. The employee no longer relies on the top down approach to find solutions to their challenges. The fact that the onus of success is shared, I believe, makes success much more plausible in any given situation. The fact that since sitting back and letting one person take all the responsibility is not an option within the empowerment model serves as a factor which makes sucess more attainable.
I think that empowerment is very important to in an organization. I make sure to include the cheer teams in all of the decision making such as what style of uniform, practice times, song selections for routine, etc. I do this also just in case they say they don’t like something I could always remind them that they decided it that way. Of course when you have a big team you can’t always make everybody happy so we usually do it majority rules.
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