Since the 1980s, when companies began experimenting with “empowerment”—the buzzword that summarizes what we called “decentralization of decision-making authority”—myriad studies in the social sciences have concluded that this psychological difference of empowerment has a very real impact. Jay Conger and Rabindra Kanungo’s 1988 paper “The Empower Process: Integrating Theory and Practice” noted that empowerment improved employee satisfaction. Kenneth W. Thomas and Betty A. Velthouse identified the decentralization of authority as creating “intrinsic task motivation.” Studies have found this
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