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Introduction
The overall aim of this article is to explore the nebulous concept of
“empowerment” within the context of small business management and to
suggest that, while much of the academic literature tends to discuss the concept
from a variety of informative perspectives and dimensions, in the main such
discussion fails to address the distinctive characteristics and idiosyncrasies of
the small business.
All organisations, large and small, are today struggling to develop in an
external operating environment which is epitomised by turbulence and
uncertainty. Practitioners and academics alike are focusing on the need for
effective utilisation of people as the key resource in maintaining competitive
advantage in such an uncertain environment. Within this context of effective
people management, “empowerment”, often perceived as another buzz-word for
“employee involvement or participation” or some variation of “delegation”, has
received a great deal of attention, sometimes being proffered as the “elixir” to
organisational success.
Within the small business context research shows that owner-managers
view people management as one of their most important roles, and yet one of
the tasks they find the most difficult (Hankinson et al., 1997). While a multitude
of theories, concepts and guiding frames of insight have emerged over the years
and are embraced within the human resource management knowledge base, it
Participation & Empowerment: An
can be argued that much of this knowledge has relevance to large organisations
International Journal, Vol. 7 No. 7,
1999, pp. 180-193. © MCB University
and fails to address the distinctive characteristics of the small business. This
Press, 1463-4449 paper commences by portraying the small business as a potential unique
problem type whereby qualitative as well as quantitative differences Empowerment
distinguish it from the large company. Such a conceptualisation is utilised to in small
demonstrate the high level complexity of the small firm management task as it businesses
strives to cope with the vagaries of the contemporary operating environment.
Attention is drawn to the dangers of viewing the small firm as a microcosm of
a large company and to the potentially limited utility of people management
theories, concepts and approaches which are propounded as applicable within 181
the large company context.
Having distinguished the small business context and warned of the need for
caution in the uptake of management knowledge bases which may not fully
address that context, the concept of “empowerment” is examined as a
propounded “mechanism” for the efficient and effective utilisation of the human
resource. It is suggested that while a great deal has been written about
“empowerment” in recent years, the concept as developed within the literature
is, in the main, oriented toward large organisations and much of its content
cannot be readily “transferred” to small businesses. It is further suggested,
however, that, if considered within the distinct operating contexts of the small
business, “empowering management processes” may indeed be a distinctive
feature of those small businesses which succeed in sustaining ongoing
development, and that such management activity has not yet been encapsulated
in the “empowerment” literature.
The article supports these suggestions by drawing on insight derived from
the authors’ ongoing research into the sustainable strategic development of
successful small business within the transitional economy context of Russia,
the developing economy context of Malaysia and the developed economy
context of the UK. A case study is utilised to suggest how empowering
management approaches may be key features of effective management in
growth-oriented small businesses. The base insight from the case is then
integrated with overall understanding derived from our ongoing research in its
totality to emphasise the potential role of empowerment in the small firm in
facilitating the learning about and acting on unknowable open-ended change
which predominantly impacts on the contemporary business. It is thus a
strategic learning perspective to the unfolding of understanding of
“empowerment” within small business which is offered as an innovative
context for enhancing understanding of what empowerment may mean in a
small firm context.
The article concludes by suggesting that if we are to understand what
empowerment means within growth-oriented small firms, we must expect to
find that the informalities and idiosyncrasies of such businesses will see
successful small businesses “empowering” their workforce through
management approaches not fully reflected in the current “empowerment”
literature. This may sometimes be by mechanistic means (such as at the level of
steady state production activity where a devolving of responsibility may be
apparent at the margins), occasionally be opportunistic or ad hoc and at times
may be viewed as a “natural facilitating” management approach whereby the
PEIJ positioning of key workforce provides the potential for their empowerment to
7,7 underpin organisational learning from their day-to-day interfaces with key
informants on the boundaries of the firm’s activities.
Empowerment
Empowerment is in vogue. It could be perceived as another “buzz word” of the
1990s referred to in all nature of business literature, videos which expound its
valuable utilisation in the workplace and as part of everyday “business speak”.
However, there are perceived difficulties. What is it? Arguably, there can be no
definitive framing of a concept: as Lashley and McGoldrick (1994, p. 23) state,
“… one of the ‘limits’ of empowerment is a lack of conceptual rigour in the ways
the term is actually used”. For Cole (1997, p. 373) a sound conceptualisation of
empowerment would see it as “a method of delegation which enables work
decisions to be taken as near as possible to the operating units and their
customers – both internal and external”. This portrayal reflects the view of
Mitchel Stewart (1994, p. 6), who purports not only the “devolving of tasks” but
“decision making and full responsibility”. Marchington and Wilkinson (1996, p.
112) determine that “improved levels of customer service” have been achieved
by some organisations by moving away from rigid job descriptions and
“working to contract” towards a culture of “beyond contract” which encourages
“employee initiative and empowerment”.
Attempted “definitions” of “empowerment” appear, to a great extent, to be a
variation on a theme. Each one of us internalises the concept in a slightly
different way. For example, Smith and Mouly (1998) explore the difficulty of
“definition” and determine from their case studies that there were differing
perceptions by employees as to the nature of empowerment.
Honold’s (1997) enlightening review of the literature on employee
empowerment suggests that current understanding is embedded in five
groupings within the literature:
(1) leadership’s role in creating an empowering context within an
organisation;
(2) the individual empowered state;
(3) collaborative work as empowerment;
PEIJ (4) structural or procedural change as empowerment;
7,7 (5) the multi-dimensional perspective encapsulating much of these four
categories.
In highlighting the roots of the concept of employee empowerment, Honold
gives emphasis to the wealth of relevant management knowledge developed
184 over the years and apparently capable of serving as effective guiding
management vehicles for organisations striving to bring the best out their key
“people resource” by some form of underlying “empowering” management
approach. The build-up of understanding of the concept of empowerment is, of
course, significantly embedded in the human relations school of understanding
and influencing organisations which provided a new language for managers
(Lawrence and Lee, 1989). The highly influential works of Herzberg (1966, 1968)
and Maslow (1954) provide guiding motivational models which highlight clear
advantages and benefits for empowering management approaches: Herzberg’s
two-factor theory, for example, propounds the benefits of “job enrichment”
whereby interest, challenge, responsibility and problem-based learning are,
where possible, built into a job. In the area of leadership, key works within the
literature portray shifts from an early focus on the quest for a one best
leadership style through to the benefits of a contingency approach to leadership
(for example, Blake and Mouton, 1964; Hersey and Blanchard, 1972), whereby
the manager’s approach to getting the best out of the workforce will depend on
the nature of the task in hand and its operating context, the quality and
characteristics of the workers themselves as well as the manager’s own
characteristics and preferred leadership style. Clearly, the motivation and
leadership literature point to, in some situational and worker-capability/needs
contexts, the potential to get the best out of employees through empowering
management approaches such as delegating responsibility, authority and
power to subordinates in order to anchor their capabilities fully. Moreover, more
recently the literature has begun to bring attention to the benefits associated
with organisational leaders effecting collaborative working which extends
beyond mere “group” work (involving a piecemeal collection of individuals)
toward “team” working, whereby individuals have a collective rationale where
there is clear understanding that individual performance contributes directly to
the overall good (Godfrey, 1990). Such a team context has the potential to derive
high level organisational returns by, for example, giving individuals the
authority to anchor their perspectives, understanding and learning to the good
of the collective whole.
Adding a further complementary quality to the human relations view of
organisations and its “tool kit” of empowerment-based management
approaches, is, moreover, the view that organisations are not a unitary whole,
but a loose and dynamic “coming together” of sectional groups and individuals
(Lawrence and Lee, 1989) and thus should be treated as a “pluralist” model (that
is, the political school of thought). We learn from this school that individuals or
groups within a business may constrain empowering attempts at management.
Also, careful consideration of power-bases among, and aspirations of, Empowerment
individuals or groups can facilitate the sharing of power to the benefit of the in small
organisation as a whole (Handy, 1976; Pfeffer, 1981). businesses
Clearly, the literature has much to offer in its build-up of insight over time in
terms of enhancing understanding of what empowerment may or could mean
for different organisations and different operating contexts within
organisations; as such, it offers high potential in providing guiding frames to 185
aid in the effective management of people. Whether the propounded
management approaches and techniques integral to this literature begin
effectively to address the opportunities, problems and management issues
which epitomise the world of small business practice is, however, highly
questionable. It is on this issue which the remainder of this paper focuses.
In order to achieve this insight, areas of the qualitative case study research of
the authors relating to the sustainable development of small firms are utilised to
provide empirical input from which to begin to draw tentative conclusions.
Conclusion
It appears that the adoption of a strategic learning perspective to the unfolding
of understanding of the form and role of empowerment within a small business
supports the notions emphasised by Honold (1997) that no single set of
contingencies can describe empowerment – that it is multi-dimensional.
PEIJ Small businesses are potentially ingrained with disempowering structures,
7,7 many of which derive from owner-manager and size-related characteristics
which we argue above can manifest in unique problem types impacting on the
small firm. For example, one can expect to find that owner-manager attitudes
and motivations in many small firms centre around independence, autonomy
and control manifesting in an autocratic management style whereby any forms
190 of delegation or empowerment are kept to a minimum. For others, one way of
circumventing the impact of potential unique problem types is to create an
empowering culture whereby empowerment and self-empowerment become
more “a way of doing things around here”, albeit often in a rather ad hoc or
opportunistic situation – and employee-specific manner. In such firms we begin
to understand the multi-dimensional nature of empowerment in terms of:
• Willingness and ability of leadership to nurture changes in culture and
structure commensurate with growth stages of development.
• Idiosyncratic and informal learning activities in which experiment and
trial and error are facilitated.
• Fluid collaborative activities, whereby key workers drift in and out of
team-based activities on an incident or project-specific basis. Here an
individual’s power base is fluid and dependent on proximity to owner-
manager/key decision makers, probably for the duration of a specific
project or incident.
• Small business development-embedded – whereby empowerment may
relate to an enlarged role which the individual must him/herself “grow
into” (often without formal training) and which may also be
accompanied by self-empowering actions by the owner-manager who
strives to influence his/her own behaviour to cope with the vagaries of
the new emergent management tasks which the firm’s growth is
unfolding (or the management abilities and tasks which are necessary to
facilitate the growth).
• A type of “mutual inter-relationship empowerment” which fuels the self-
empowering of the owner-manager where an empowerment in the form
of anchoring the know-how of key external informants is crucial to the
self-development of the owner-manager as he/she is constantly
confronted with new unfolding situations in the wake of the firm’s
growth. This together with a “counter empowering” whereby key
external informants such as suppliers develop into a form of
management extension to the small firm underpinned by co-operation,
sharing and working together. Such an empowering relationship may be
viewed as an idiosyncratic management approach whereby time,
resource and management ability constraints are circumvented by
anchoring-in, say, supplier, agent, or distributor know-how to broaden
and deepen existing small firm management capability.
• “Empowerment” within the growth-oriented small business is probably Empowerment
best conceptualised in terms of “contingent processes” whereby pre- in small
requisite to its occurrence is management’s first feeling confident that it businesses
is “safe” to relinquish power and to give more authority to particular
employees (Johnson, 1995; Fleming, 1991). Integral to this are the issues
of confidence and trust with regard to an employee’s ability to undertake
effectively a particular task and the likelihood that employees will be 191
given boundaries of autonomy within which to operate and innovate.
This is supportive of the work of Geroy et al. (1998) who build on the
“boundaries” insight of Blanchard (1997) and the “trust” issue developed
by Mountford (1997). Within the small business context it seems likely
that, even in those growing firms where “empowering management
approaches” are evident, there will be dualistic paradigms whereby the
traditional authority and power values and motivations of the owner-
manager combine with the low level skills and negative attitudes of some
workers to see a management control paradigm dictate. Paralleling this,
however, may be developmental situations whereby unfolding tasks and
activities are viewed as compatible to the developing capabilities of
particular individuals and where the owner-management control
paradigm gives way to bounded territories of authority and
responsibility for those employees with whom the owner-manager feels
“safe”.
It is a real depth of understanding as to the nature and form of management
approaches and activities that underpin sustainable small business
development which continues to prove a void in the management literature.
Embedded in this yet-to-be-revealed knowledge base will be further
understanding of what empowerment means in a small business context. This
paper has attempted to suggest the need to relax the use of large company-
oriented paradigms as interpretative frames of reference for the enhancing of
understanding of small business development. In this way we may begin to find
that empowering management approaches of a novel or unexpected nature are
key vehicles to the sustainable development of the growth-oriented small
business.
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