Employee perceptions of empowerment

By Kay Greasley, Alan Bryman, Andrew Dainty, A. Price, R. Soetanto, Nicole M. King. 2005

235 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Purpose – This study aims to examine how empowerment is perceived by individuals employed on construction projects. In contrast with previous research which has predominantly been conducted from a management perspective, this paper deals with employee perceptions of empowerment.Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative approach was adopted for this study employing in‐depth interviews on four major construction projects.Findings – The findings from the study indicate that there can be a gap between the employee experience and the management rhetoric. Health and Safety issues were often cited by the employees as a major barrier to empowerment. The strict Health and Safety regulations under which construction employees operate limit their freedom to influence the work that they undertake. A further factor that was found to have a strong influence on the diffusion of empowerment was the role of the employees’ immediate supervisor.Research limitations/implications – The data are based on case studies that il...

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Management Science and Operations Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7d78820c2d2eb59f6eedf43d0d11f72cbd3e38c9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management Information Systems

1. Linas Turauskas
2. Lucy L. Gilson
3. John E. Mathieu
4. M. Maynard
5. Rūta Kazlauskaitė
6. Ilona Buciuniene

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. M. Maynard
2. Lucy L. Gilson
3. John E. Mathieu
4. S. Rothmann
5. Marius W. Stander
6. Steve W. J. Kozlowski

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Marius W. Stander
2. Lucy L. Gilson
3. M. Maynard
4. John E. Mathieu
5. S. Rothmann
6. Linas Turauskas
7. Rūta Kazlauskaitė
8. Ilona Buciuniene

Citations in the corpus

• Organisational and psychological empowerment in the HRM‐performance linkage (2011, background): “These attempts have been criticised for being too exposed to high levels of subjectivity from the respondent side, as such samples are built on a single respondent per organisation (den Hartog et al., 2004; Greasley et al., 2005), usually an HR or other top-level manager.”
• Empowerment—Fad or Fab? A Multilevel Review of the Past Two Decades of Research (2012, background): “Following the arguments regarding the need for an alignment of empowerment and human capital, advanced above, Greasley et al. (2005) suggested that work designs also must be complementary.”
• Psychological empowerment, job insecurity and employee engagement (2010, background): “Greasley et al. (2005) found that workers who perceive themselves as empowered experience reduced levels of job insecurity (emotional strain).”