Employee Empowerment & Job Satisfaction

 "The Effects of Employee Empowerment on Employee Job Satisfaction." International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 23.6 (2011): 784,784-802. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 26 Sep. 2011.

Empowerment can be defined as giving people the power to do something. In the scholarly journal “The Effects of Employee Empowerment on Employee Job Satisfaction” a study was conducted to find if psychological and behavior empowerment effects job satisfaction. The study found that there is a relationship between both psychological and behavior empowerment and job satisfaction. This study was conducted on hotels in Turkey, but the overall result can be applied to just about all industries.

Thinking about myself personally at work, I enjoy being able to make choices and contributing my ideas to the business. Therefore, it makes sense to me that employee empowerment leads to job satisfaction. The journal states that employee empowerment “gives rise to organizational commitment, motivation, performance, and customer satisfaction.” By giving employees empowerment, they are much more willing to play an active role in the organization they work for. Employees like to be taken seriously when they try to contribute ideas, but many organizations ignore their employee’s ideas. As a supervisor at work, I understand that it is hard to always let employees take charge. But, I can say from experience that there are many things we do differently at work that help get our job done faster and much more efficiently because we have listen and taken into consideration employee ideas. The thought of knowing that you have a voice in the organization makes you feel important and this is what I try to do at work every day.

The study found that 78.4 percent of the respondents were not content with their wages in the hotel business. Even though this study was focused on the hotel industry, there are many people in different fields that are not content with their wages. This dissatisfaction leads to poor productivity at work. It is important to reward employees financially when they are doing a good job, this keeps them motivated. On the other hand, many employers find it hard to compensate their employees because they are not being as productive as they can be. This is all just a big cycle that is hard to break away from. But, I believe it is the employer’s responsibility to let his employees know that he/she is willing to compensate their hard work. The employer needs make it known to his employees that they are a special part of the organization.

The study also found that employees in the hotel industry are “deprived of the opportunity to undertake different tasks.” The study suggests that managers “enforce implementations such as job enrichment and/or rotation.” I find myself getting very bored at work when doing the same thing over and over again. In my opinion, getting bored with what you are doing makes you do it a lot slower and less efficient. Whenever I can do something different, even if it’s a small phone call, I go ahead and do it to distract myself for a while. Once I come back to what I was originally doing, I find errors I had not noticed at first and this gives me the opportunity to fix them. I feel like just about everyone experiences this when they are at work, school, home, etc. The idea is to give employees different options of work if available. One week they can be working on one project, the next on a different project, whatever suits the business/industry. But, there are small things that management can do different to keep employees working hard and being efficient. Some of these implications may cost some extra money (wages), but if the employee knows why they are being compensated they will turn around and thank the company with their work.