Increasing Efficiency and Effectiveness in Organisations - Essay Example

Is empowerment a valuable tool for increasing efficiency and effectiveness in today’s organizations? While the importance of empowerment as a tool that increases efficiency and effectiveness in organizations was always much, it has only increased in magnitude over the course of time. The work culture and business needs in the present age are quite different from those of the past. Today, in order to excel in the market and gain competitive advantage, organizations need to empower the workforce so that they can think higher than their respective levels and make a positive contribution in the organizational growth. Gone are the days when the top management needed to guide the workforce through every stage and tell the workforce at each stage what it needed to do. Today’s managers expect the workforce to be more creative and full of innovative ideas because it is fundamentally innovation and creativity that is valued the most in the present age and provides the contemporary organizations with competitive advantage. Empowerment of the workforce reduces the cost of business as top management finds help from the existing human resources. In this paper, I argue that empowerment is a tool with which an organization’s efficiency and effectiveness can be improved. This paper starts over by first explaining the topic of the paper and discussing the concept of empowerment. This is followed by a discussion of the reasons why empowerment should be considered as a tool of improving an organization’s efficiency and effectiveness. The first reason is that empowerment increases an organization’s tendency to be creative and innovative in the design of its products and/or services. The second reason is that empowerment puts the workers in a position where they can actually play their individualistic and collective role in the growth and prosperity of the organization. The third reason is that empowerment creates a healthy psychology of workers at the workplace that is a pre-requisite of the utilization of full potential on the part of the workers. An organization’s success is measured by two main factors; its efficiency and its effectiveness. The efficiency of an organization can be understood as the productivity of the organization or the useful work that was achieved by the organization as it had intended to. On the other hand, the effectiveness of an organization can be understood as its power, weight, or influence that it may use to achieve its goals. Different organizations have different goals and accordingly, the effectiveness of an organization is measured from the level to which the goals have been achieved. Empowerment is basically this confidence of the managers that the workers are competent and skilled in the work they do (Johnson, n.d., p. 14), so the managers tend to take benefit of their knowledge and skills by empowering them. Since empowerment is a consequence of the trust of the top management in the organizational personnel, the whole organization essentially acts like one unit in which all people are like family members. Empowerment of the organizational personnel is basically empowerment of the organizational culture, so empowerment essentially serves as a tool that improves the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization. Empowerment of the workforce in an organization provides the organization with a wide pool of ideas that it can employ to make innovative products and/or services and enhance the profitability of the business. Empowerment of the workforce is more of a need than an option in business in the present age. “In recent years empowerment has been a very popular idea in organizations because global competition and rapid technological change has required that organizations make substantial changes to the way they manage their employees” (Elloy, 2012, p. 627). Over the past few decades, competition among organizations in delivering their products and/or services has increased manifolds as a result of the advancement of technology. This has provided the consumers with a lot of options to choose from. An organization in the present age risks losing its consumer base if it does not modify its products and/or services according to the needs and desires of the consumers since consumers have other organizations available to them that do produce the products and/or services of their choice. This imparts the need for an organization to be creative in its approach. Creativity comes with diversity of thoughts, cultures, ideas, and approaches. One individual’s ability to think creatively is limited because creativity in an individual fundamentally emerges from the individual’s learning and past experiences. An individual who is more learned would have more ideas because he/she has seen things happen in different ways around the world. One individual’s creative thinking is just as good as the individual’s diversity of experiences. To excel in the highly competitive environment, it is imperative that all constrains and hindrances in the way of being creative are eradicated. Only by removing these obstacles can an organization optimize on its ability to come up with innovative ideas and develop unique products and services for the consumers. Therefore, if the entire responsibility of thinking creatively rests upon the shoulders of the top management, and the workers are only required to do as directed, it is quite likely that the results would not be very favorable for the organization as a whole. On the other hand, if workers are empowered to propose unique ideas and approaches to the top management regarding how the organizational products and/or services can be improved, and if the top management consults the workforce while making important decisions regarding the design and development of the product or service, the number of minds thinking on different lines to reach the same goal definitely increases along with a consequential improvement in the quality of the product or service. Empowerment helps the workforce optimize on its potential to play a positive role in the growth and development of the organization. Today, the business world is recovering from the effects of the global financial crisis that had started in the year 2008 and continued till 2010. Although the global financial crisis has subsided considerably, yet it has taught the organizations some very important lessons, one of which happens to be the importance of making correct use of the existing resources rather than spending money on acquiring new resources all the time. During the global financial crisis, a lot of organizations across the globe downsized in an attempt to reduce the cost of business and maintain, if not improve, the profitability of the business to the level where it was before the start of the crisis. By increasing the dependence upon the existing workforce and empowering it rather than recruiting new workers, many organizations realized that the workforce was much more useful as an organizational resource than it has ever been considered in the past. When an organization wants to cut down the costs of business, the best way is to rely on the existing workforce. However, increasing the work-load upon the workers without hiring additional workers to take the load imparts the need for the top management to provide the workers with more flexibility and empowerment than they have been granted before. Empowerment of the workforce is psychologically rewarding for them. “Employee empowerment initiatives based on industrial democracy and the principle of participative management reflects a positive link between employee participation and job satisfaction, motivation and performance, individual commitment and organisational achievement” (Sahoo, Behera, and Tripathy, 2010, p. 40). As a result of their research, Seibert, Silver, and Randolph (2004) found that there is a positive relation between the climate of work-unit empowerment and the work-unit performance outcomes. Empowerment reduces corruption in an organization and improves auditing, thus resulting in a saving of the organizational resources and improved efficiency of work. Sometimes, organizations suffer from a local crisis which is caused by the administrative corruption. “There are numerous examples of such crisis such as the crisis which led to the collapse of Petra Bank in Jordan and the strike of railway workers in France” (Areiqat and Zamil, 2011, p. 188). A very beneficial result of workers’ empowerment is improved auditing and check-and-balance of the work procedures. When a manager is all in all in an organization, lower level workers tend to do corruption because they know that they are only checked by the manager. No one else is empowered to monitor the performance of workers, so workers assume a lot of tendency to do corruption in whichever way they can. When the workers are empowered, the corrupt employees know that there are other people inside the organization whom the manager has placed trust in. Thus, their corruption can cost them their job if the empowered coworkers take an action against them. Concluding, empowerment of workers is the need of doing business successfully in the highly competitive and innovation-driven market place in the present age. In light of the points discussed in this paper, it is quite safe to say that empowerment is a valuable tool for increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the organizations today. References: Areiqat, AYM, and Zamil, AM 2011, The Role of Empowerment in Crisis Management in Business Organizations, Asian Journal of Business Management, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 188-195. Elloy, D 2012, Effects of Ability Utilization, Job Influence and Organization Commitment on Employee Empowerment: An Empirical Study, International Journal of Management, Vol. 29, No. 2, Part 2, pp. 627-632. Johnson, M n.d., Workforce Deviance and the Business Case for Employee Engagement, The Journal for Quality and Participation, pp. 11-16. Sahoo, CK, Behera, N, and Tripathy, SK 2010, Employee Empowerment and Individual Commitment: An Analysis from Integrative Review of Research, Employment Relations Record, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 40-56. Seibert, SE, Silver, SR, and Randolph, WA 2004, Taking Empowerment to the Next Level: A Multiple-Level Model of Empowerment, Performance, and Satisfaction, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 47, No. 3, pp. 332-349. Read More