International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2003
Chapter One
EMPOWERMENT AND PERFORMANCE
Toby D. Wall, Stephen J. Wood, and Desmond J. Leach
Institute of Work Psychology, University of Sheffield, UK
INTRODUCTION
In the last decade the notion of empowerment has become popular in I/O
psychology and management circles. Its currency among practitioners can be
illustrated by the view of a CEO who stated that 'No vision, no strategy can
be achieved without able and empowered employees' (cited in Argyris, 1998,
p. 98). Concurrently, a survey based on a representative sample of 564 UK
manufacturing companies (Waterson, Clegg, Bolden, Pepper, Warr, & Wall,
1999) showed that, although only 23% reported using empowerment extensively,
72% had adopted empowerment initiatives to at least some degree,
had done so within the last few years, and had planned to develop them
further.
Similar rates of adoption have been reported in Japan, Australia and
Switzerland (Clegg, Wall, Pepper, Stride, Woods, Morrison et al., 2002),
and in the USA ... read full excerpt from International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Vol.18 ebook
