l % e Road to Empowerment : Seven Questions Every Leader Should Consider

0 rganizations are demanding more from their employees than ever before. Higher customer expectations, increased globalization, more sophisticated technologythese are a few of the conditions at work. It’s an environment where traditional commandand-control hierarchies are increasingly less appropriate. Instead, employees must learn to take initiative, be creative, and accept responsibility for their actions. They need to be UempoweredN-or so a growing consensus indicates. Despite feelings that empowerment can give an organization competitive advantage, and despite the fact that many managers agree that empowerment is desirable, companies often run into problems with implementation. This article explores the reasons this promising concept often proves elusive. To do so, we draw on over a decade of experience working with organizations as they struggled with empowerment, as well as from intensive research that examined the antecedents, consequences, and processes of implementing employee empowerment in large organizations. Taken as a whole, this research points to seven key questions managers must confront if they hope to impleGRETCHEN M. SPREITZER