PRACTICE Empowerment and Engagement

Objective The two following exercises will help you become more knowledgeable about what an empowering and engaging workplace is for you now or might be in the future. The first exercise, the Personal Empowerment Assessment instrument (Spreitzer, 1995), will provide you with a selfassessment of how empowered you feel in your current role in an organization. The second exercise asks you to think about organizations in general and to try to identify the reasons why people would choose to stay with an organization they currently work in versus choosing to leave for another organization or opportunity.

Directions Personal Empowerment Assessment This instrument helps identify the extent to which you are empowered in your own work. You should respond to the items based on your own job. The items listed below describe different orientations people can have with respect to their work roles. Using the following scale, indicate the extent to which you believe each is true of you.

Very strongly disagree	Very strongly disagree	Disagree	Nuetral	agree	Strongly agree	Very strongly agree
1	2	3	4	5	6	7

Rating _____1. The work that I do is very important to me. _____2. I am confident about my ability to do my work. _____3. I have significant autonomy in determining how I do my job. _____4. I have significant impact on what happens in my work unit. _____5. I trust my coworkers to be completely honest with me. _____6. My work activities are personally meaningful to me. _____7. My work is within the scope of my competence and capabilities. _____8. I can decide how to go about doing my own work. _____9. I have a great deal of control over what happens in my work unit. _____ 10. I trust my coworkers to share important information with me. _____ 11. I care about what I do in my work. _____ 12. I am confident in my capabilities to successfully perform my work. _____ 13. I have considerable opportunity for independence and freedom in how I do my work. _____ 14. I have significant influence over what happens in my work unit. _____ 15. I trust my coworkers to keep the promises they make. _____ 16. The work I do has special meaning and importance to me. _____ 17. I have mastered the skills necessary to do my work. _____ 18. I have a chance to use my personal initiative in carrying out my work. _____ 19. My opinion counts in my work unit's decision making. _____ 20. I believe that my coworkers care about my wellbeing.

Personal Empowerment Assessment Scoring Key

EMPOWERMENT DIMENSION	Items	MEAN (total/4)
SelfEfficacy (competence)	2, 7, 12, 17
SelfDetermination (choice)	3, 8, 13, 18
Personal Control (impact)	4, 9, 14, 19
Meaningfulness (value)	1, 6, 11, 16
Trust (security)	5, 10, 15, 20

Based on the scores of approximately 3,000 midlevel managers in manufacturing and service organizations, the following are comparison means.

DIMENSION	MEAN	TOP THIRD	BOTTOM THIRD
SelfEfficacy	5.37	>6.52	<5.00
SelfDetermination	5.50	>6.28	<4.72
Personal Control	5.49	>6.34	<4.64
Meaningfulness	5.88	>6.65	<5.12
Trust	5.33	>6.03	<4.73

Discussion Questions

Write or jot down answers to the following questions. Share your answers with someone in the class or with a trusted friend.

On which of the five dimensions did you score yourself highest? Lowest? Are you surprised by either score? Why or why not? Why do you think the high and low turned out as they did? If your immediate coworkers or teammates completed this selfassessment, do you think their results would be similar to yours? Why or why not? Are you happy with your overall sense of how empowered you are now? If not, what might you do to address the situation?

Reflection People who have a high need for growth and autonomy may find it especially difficult to work in organizations where acting in an empowered way is not encouraged. Similarly, people who are not comfortable in making decisions and taking charge may be very uncomfortable in a workplace where empowerment is the norm. If you have an employee who does not seem comfortable with being empowered, what can you do as a manager to help that person see the value of empowerment and learn to be more comfortable acting in an empowered way?

Directions Employee Engagement: Why People Choose to Stay with an Organization Individually first, and then with your group (if assigned), identify 10 reasons why individuals choose to stay with a particular organization as opposed to leaving for another organization/job. As best you can, please rank them in priority order from most important (1) to last (10).

Reasons to stay	RANKINGS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Discussion Questions

Compare your list to the one below. Are there any items on that list that you do not consider important? If so, why not? These data are from a survey of employees in the tech sector. To what extent do you think the reasons identified or the order of importance of those reasons are influenced by the type of people who choose to work in that industry? Can you think of examples of other industries where the rankings or reasons would be significantly different?

Top 10 Reasons Why People Stay (based on data collected by Career Systems International, 2012)

Exciting Work & Challenge Working with Great People & Relationships Career Growth, Learning, & Development Fair Pay Management Support/Great Boss Being Recognized, Valued, & Respected Meaningful Work, Making a Difference, & Contribution Pride in Organization, Mission, & Products Benefits Great Work Environment

Reflection People who are empowered and engaged can add tremendous value to the workplace, not only through their own contributions but also by inspiring others. What can you do as a manager to be sure that you are serving as a positive role model of empowerment and engagement?