Alison Caillé[1] and Christine Jeoffrion[2]
Faced with changes in the world of work (increased competition, digitalisation, competitiveness, need to innovate, etc.) but also with the emerging aspirations of employees (search for meaning, recognition, need for fulfilment at work, thirst for continuous learning and development, etc.), companies are experimenting with ‘new’ organisational modes and managerial models. Thus, managerial innovation approaches based on the ‘empowerment’ of workers are increasingly popular in organisations wishing to combine an improved performance with the well-being of their employees. Empowerment emerged in France in the 2000s, in the form of participatory democracy models claiming to gain power and control for communities. Applied to the work context, empowerment is usually translated using terms such as ‘responsabilisation’, ‘enhancement or ‘autonomisation’.
Broadly speaking, empowerment is characterised by the sharing of power and responsibility between a leader and team members (Conger and Kanungo, 1988). According to Boudrias and Bérard (2016), it refers to ‘the fact that a transfer of power and responsibility is made by hierarchical superiors to their subordinates. It is then a question of empowering individuals to take over some of the management of their work themselves’ (p. 106). According to Lawler (1992), empowerment of employees is achieved through delegation of authority by the supervisor, but also through the sharing of information important to the work context and knowledge needed to perform tasks, as well as through forms of rewards (monetary or non-monetary) to show appreciation for contributions made. Nowadays, this approach is of particular interest to managers insofar as it would enable them to maximise both organisational performance and the well-being of employees (Boudrias and Bérard, 2016; Lawler, 1992; Maynard et al., 2012). Indeed, insofar as employee initiatives become essential sources of competitive advantage for organisations (Verrier and Bourgeois, 2016), the optimisation of their power to act through empowerment seems attractive.
The question is therefore whether these empowerment practices meet the needs and expectations of all employees. What is the role of the workers themselves in the implementation of these innovative ‘empowerment’ approaches? And how can the organisation support the managers who have the task of carrying out this change in the management model?
1. Organisational context of the study: an empowerment process in an aeronautical factory
The main interest of our study is that it is part of an action-research project carried out over three years for a CIFRE thesis[3]. The latter took place in a production plant belonging to a large French aeronautical company that has been experimenting for nearly five years with an employee ‘empowerment’ approach aimed at linking well-being and performance. This plant employs around 3,300 people and, at the time of the study, some thirty teams on the site were operating in ‘empowered’ mode. The local managers of these units, known as ‘empowering leaders’, have in fact shifted from the role of manager to that of facilitator, acting as support rather than supervising, resulting in a high level of confidence in the achievement of objectives, a strengthening of the meaning given to work, support for autonomy, and the involvement of team members in decision-making; this refers to the four dimensions of ‘empowering leadership’ according to Ahearne et al. In some of the so-called ‘pioneer’ units of the approach, the line managers in production were co-opted by the operators via a participatory process of collective decision-making (circle method) and a hierarchical level of the managerial line was removed in order to flatten the organisational structure and gain in ‘agility’. Also, some teams of operators and technicians are managed autonomously, as ‘mini-factories’, with, for example, the management of their own budget and profit and loss account. In the long term, the company’s objective is to deploy and generalise this approach of employee empowering to the entire production site.
2. Objective of the study
In this rapidly changing organisational context, we asked ourselves what employees thought about these large-scale changes and how they experienced them. Indeed, to date, very little research has deployed empirical observational devices based on valid scientific foundations to understand and explain ongoing managerial innovation experiences (Landivar and Trouvé, 2017; Ughetto, 2018). Much of the literature on managerial innovation, such as that on the so-called liberated enterprise (Getz and Carney, 2012), favours the collection of glorifying anecdotes from ‘liberating leaders’ and of unproblematic narratives to inform its ‘philosophy’ (Landivar and Trouvé, 2017). At the same time, these ‘new’ managerial models are the subject of much reflection and criticism (e.g., Detchessahar, 2019; Grosjean et al., 2016; Verrier and Bourgeois, 2016). Numerous journalistic and academic publications have even gone against these models, highlighting their limits and even their dangers (e.g., Dahmani, 2011; Linhart, 2015). However, to our knowledge, few studies have highlighted the points of view of employees evolving in these innovative managerial models. Yet, they are often the first to be affected by organisational changes. In contrast to other exploratory field studies conducted (e.g., Getz and Carney, 2012; Landivar and Trouvé, 2017), our study is situated in a perspective of change monitoring: we therefore interviewed not only people who were experimenting or had experimented the managerial innovation approach being implemented, but also those who worked in so-called ‘classic’ sectors of the company and could be led to evolve progressively towards this mode of operation.
Thus, the aim of our study was to conduct a qualitative survey in a company where experiments in employee empowerment were underway. By questioning employees directly about their feelings regarding the ‘empowering’ practices of their managers, we sought to explore how these experiments were experienced in practice. From a change monitoring perspective, we used Lewin’s (1959) theory of quasi-stationary equilibrium, which sees the group as a system in a state of ‘quasi-stationary’ equilibrium, i.e., a state of equilibrium between forces that are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction, some of which are favourable to change (driving forces) and others which are unfavourable to it (obstacles to change). It was therefore a question of identifying the main factors constituting resistance to the implementation of an empowerment approach, but also the driving forces constituting, on the contrary, levers to make the organisation evolve towards the desired situation, i.e., an empowering model as an alternative to the classic and bureaucratic company model. In another article, we presented these obstacles and levers from an organisational perspective (Caillé and Jeoffrion, 2021). In this contribution, we will opt for an individual perspective in order to highlight the obstacles and levers available to the individuals themselves with regard to a managerial innovation approach. Within organisations, it is not uncommon for managers to attribute the success or failure of an empowerment process to the individuals themselves, to their determination (or lack thereof), or even to their personality traits… But what is really the case? In fact, we propose here a methodological device based on a scientific approach in order to ‘deliberate’ on the role of individual factors in the implementation of an empowerment process.
3. Methodology
3.1. Sampling and data collection procedure
At the time of the survey, the empowerment approach was being rolled out within the plant and not all managers adopting empowering practices were identified or identifiable as such within the company. In this context, it was difficult to quantify the exact number of people and teams involved in the process, especially as team changes were frequent (high staff turnover). We therefore interviewed a sample of employees representative of the entire company. Because of these frequent changes and the many exchanges between employees on these practices, whether they had personally experienced empowering managerial practices or not was not taken into account in the constitution of the sample, but this fact will nevertheless be mentioned in the interview extracts.
Due to the large number of employees in the company (around 3,300 people), the selection was carried out by drawing lots, taking into account representativeness criteria (gender, age, seniority, sector, etc.). By agreement with the actors in the field, the minimum number of interviews to be carried out was 30, in order to cover all of the employees’ sectors (production, support, services), statuses (operators, technicians, managers) and occupations in the factory, which this allowed us to implement the most participatory approach possible (Anadón, 2007). Once we had obtained the selected people’s agreement, the interviews were scheduled according to availability due to industrial production constraints.
The individual and group interview techniques were combined for practical reasons but also because they provide complementary views. Whereas group discussions stimulate a collective dynamic through confrontation of ideas, a co-developed reflection on a specific theme (Markova, 2003) and the highlighting of collective and group norms (Duchesne and Haegel, 2004), individual, face-to-face interviews allow for a more personal examination of the subjects discussed. In total, 37 interviews were conducted, including 20 individual interviews (13 managers and seven employees) lasting an average of one hour, and 17 group interviews (with 20 managers and 88 employees) lasting an average of two hours, bringing together 5 to 8 people. Hence, 128 employees were interviewed, of which 33 were managers and 95 supervised employees, with an average age of 40. When setting up the participants for the group interviews, the homogeneity of status and professions was respected so that each person felt free to express itself, without feeling restricted by the hierarchical status of the other participants (Duchesne and Haegel, 2004). The groups were therefore made up solely of managers and employees from similar sectors and professions. With the agreement of the participants, all the interviews were recorded (40 hours of audio recording) and transcribed in full.
3.2. Tool: interview guide
The first part of the interview guide introduced the instructions given to the interviewees by specifying the confidential and anonymous framework of the exchange. The second part consisted of four themes, referring to the four dimensions of empowering leadership identified by Ahearne et al. (2005): 1) trust; 2) autonomy; 3) participation in decision-making; 4) meaning of work. Thanks to the previous surveys carried out in the framework of this research-action and to field observations, supplementary questions associated with sub-themes linked to each dimension had been pre-established (Caillé et al., 2020). Then, an opening question related to the broader notion of empowerment was asked at the end of each theme. At the end of the interview we asked the participants: ‘In your opinion, are there any obstacles within your company that prevent you from implementing empowerment initiatives? Or, on the contrary, are there any levers (strengths) that should be reinforced to support you in this direction?’. These last questions are the focus of this article. Two versions of the interview guides have been created to suit them to managers and employees.
3.3. Analysis of the data
The comments collected were transcribed in full and anonymised, and then subjected to a thematic content analysis (Bardin, 2013). The careful rereading of each of the interview transcripts gave rise to a search for ‘thematic transversality’, so as to classify the verbatims collected into the thematic categories identified. Within the framework of this study, our analysis grid was based on two major categories: on the one hand, the obstacles –of an individual nature– relating to the implementation of an empowerment process, and on the other hand, the individual levers favouring this type of process. The redundancy of the discourses in the interviews determined a data saturation, guaranteeing its maximum diversity and constituting, in this respect, an indicator of representativeness (Mucchielli, 2003).
4. Results
The comments collected in the context of this qualitative study led us to identify points to consider in relation to individual expectations, perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes, but they also enabled us to highlight the resources that can be mobilised by the organisation to support individual managers and employees in the empowerment process. We will describe these individual obstacles and levers below, based on verbatim representative of the participants’ discourse.
4.1. Individual barriers associated with the empowerment process
The analysis of the interviews enabled us to identify three types of individual obstacles: 1) inter-individual differences with regard to autonomy and responsibilities; 2) negative representations of empowerment and a ‘boss’ culture; 3) the difficulty of challenging management to promote the sharing of power and responsibilities (see Table 1).
In the discourse of the interviewees, we often found the idea that empowerment was an interesting approach, but that it depended on the people to whom it was proposed. Thus, investment in an empowerment approach should emanate from the individual’s desire, as there are inter-individual differences in the need for autonomy and responsibility at work. Indeed, for some, autonomy tends to be perceived as a mark of confidence, allowing them to manage their daily tasks independently, and sometimes also as a form of challenge. For others, autonomy may be experienced as an additional responsibility, a burden to be managed in addition to the prescribed work, a source of tension or pressure, which could then generate discomfort or even ill-being at work.
Also, employees’ perceptions and beliefs can act as an obstacle on the empowerment process. The notion of the ‘liberated factory’, which was initially used by certain ‘liberating leaders’ (a term used by Getz and Carney, 2012) in the company, aroused distrust because it was associated with a lack of framework, a form of laxity, and a lack of authority on the part of the line manager. Indeed, according to Grosjean et al. (2016), the use of the word ‘liberated’ in a professional context implies a form of freedom from controls and strong structuring in favour of ‘blind’ trust. In addition, some people reported negative experiences in relation to this approach, as the fact of having ‘widened the framework’ during the first experiments in empowerment may have generated some misunderstandings and frustrations, linked to a feeling of injustice, due to managerial practices close to ‘laissez-faire’. In connection with these negative representations of empowerment, within this industrial environment we noted a strong culture of the ‘boss’ as a technical expert, all-knowing and deriving his legitimacy from his hierarchical status. This ‘boss culture’ (Hervé, 2015) is particularly prevalent in the industrial environment and can act as an obstacle on changes in managerial positions if employees are not prepared to be faced with a manager who accepts that he or she does not know everything and who does not rely exclusively on hierarchical authority to manage the team, but rather on leadership style.
On this point, several interviewed employees expressed doubts about the willingness of managers (at all levels) to engage in an innovative managerial approach such as empowerment, which in fact implies a sharing of power and responsibility between the line manager and his or her team members. Managers play a central role in driving an empowerment approach, as it changes their power zone; without questioning their own managerial posture, no change can be achieved. This managerial conception implies reconsidering the vertical hierarchical posture of ‘command and control’, with an ‘expert, all-knowing leader’, to move towards a horizontalization of practices based on open dialogue and a posture that encourages more participation and collaboration. It is therefore no longer a question of considering managers as leaders whose activity would consist in supervising, controlling, and sanctioning the work of operational teams. This point was largely raised by ‘managed’ participants, but some local managers (operative level) also expressed their difficulties in implementing empowerment initiatives when their own manager (intermediate level) was not inclined to this mode of operation.
Table 1. Interview verbatims – Individual barriers to empowerment
Inter-individual | ‘Because there are people who like to be led and looked after. It depends on the character. Because forcing someone to do something they don’t want to do isn’t much good, it can be discouraging.’ (Operator) |
Negative beliefs about | ‘I think there may have been too much liberation, people do anything they want, but there are some limits anyway. […] You have to keep the limits, freedom is good, but not too much. Otherwise, it’s dangerous. The manager is still a manager, and there are rules to respect.’ (Operator). ‘I think that the boss should be imposing’ (Operator); ‘a boss says: you do this, and you do that. That’s how I see things. We’ll see what happens in some time’.(Technician) ‘The boss will always have his say because he’s still a boss and basically the boss is there to decide, so normally he should know the best solution’. (Operator) |
Difficulties to question | ‘After today, does everyone want to go on with this? Because let’s face it, there are also managers who want to keep their control… Because, after all, one must be able to question oneself and let go some of the power in your own hands. Are all the managers willing to do so?’(Local manager – Pilot unit for the empowerment process) It’s all very well to work as a manager at the operational level, but if the whole line above us is not involved in this process, the pressure will remain the same and our room for manoeuvre will not be improved’. (Local manager) |
4.2. Individual levers associated with the empowerment process
In any case, to deal with these individual obstacles, several individual resources can be mobilised by the organisation to enable employees to adapt to the changes taking place. These individual levers concern both managers and ‘managed’ employees (see Table 2).
As already mentioned, managers play a central role in the implementation of an empowerment process, not least because it depends to a large extent on their ability to question their managerial posture. For many team leaders, becoming a manager represents a significant career move that marks their professional identity. As work plays a particularly important role in the identity construction of French workers (Davoine and Méda, 2008; Pezé, 2008), a professional questioning would imply a personal questioning. Consequently, managers would need support in their personal development through training that may help them get to know themselves better, discover their modes of operation, the triggers of their motivation and the way they see the world (coaching), interact with others (non-violent communication), and even learn to manage their emotions. This managerial support seems to be underway for first-level managers in the aeronautical production plant investigated, since more than half of the team leaders have attended a ‘leadership school’ (55 out of 90). However, some participants insist that this managerial transformation should also be applied to managers higher up in the hierarchy, so as to allow a change in the system as a whole.
Employees are also key players in the implementation of an empowerment approach, as they are the ones who take on additional responsibilities. The organisation’s support for employees can therefore take the form of training, either for personal or professional development. In terms of technical skills, employees are generally in demand for training and the company’s role is to encourage access to professional training to enable them to increase their skills (an essential condition for empowerment). The development of versatility –multi-skilling– is also an essential element in moving towards greater autonomy at work, and this broadening of skills, which makes it possible to counteract the repetitiveness of tasks, is often appreciated by operators in workshops. Even if the job characteristics remain the same, multi-skilling training should be encouraged to strengthen the workers’ motivation and involvement. In terms of personal development, the interpersonal skills of employees can be developed with a view to empowerment by offering them training to get them to know themselves better and to identify their ‘talents’, in order to better define their professional aspirations. Similarly, training can be provided to improve interactions between colleagues (and, therefore, collective work), for example in non-violent communication. According to some participants, developing people’s empathy –listening to the needs of others– and valuing kindness in the workplace, could facilitate interpersonal relationships in such environment.
Table 2. Interview verbatim–Individual levers of empowerment
Manager support | ‘Today, there are a lot of training cycles and courses for level 1 line managers, their team and all, especially to support the empowerment process. On the other hand, sometimes there are managers placed above me who… I’ll tell you, if they get to work at least one day, that’s a miracle.’ (Local manager) |
Employee support | ‘This is to encourage access to training for people who want it. Versatility, multi-skilling, is something that people are really asking for today.’ (Operator) |
5. Discussion
To conclude, we propose the following diagram that summarises the individual obstacles and levers associated with the implementation of an empowerment process.
Figure 1: Summary of individual obstacles and levers associated with empowerment
Ultimately, the evolution of the managerial model of contemporary companies towards greater employee empowerment is subject to several individual factors that may constitute obstacles to change. In particular, our results highlight the difficulty associated with giving more autonomy and responsibility to employees who do not express the need or desire to do so, or who consider that it is not their responsibility but that of their ‘boss’. The individual characteristics of workers seem to play a key role in their perception of empowerment practices. For example, Humborstad et al. (2014) have highlighted the importance of considering the orientation of the workers’ goal achievements (Dweck and Leggett, 1988). According to these authors, individuals with strongly learning-oriented achievement goals (i.e., those whose goal is to learn, understand and progress) tend to be more receptive to empowerment practices compared to those with performance-oriented achievement goals (i.e., those whose goal is to obtain favourable judgements about one’s competence relative to others). This is because the additional responsibilities will be seen as a challenge and an opportunity to develop their skills by adapting to new work situations. Although difficult to objectify, taking into account these inter-individual differences in achievement goal orientation seems to be a relevant criterion to best adapt empowerment practices to workers’ expectations and needs. Similarly, the negative beliefs associated with the empowerment approach in some way maintain a form of resistance to change among employees who tend to reject any experimentation of this type, under the pretext that it systematically generates a lack of framework and laxity on the part of managers.
With regard to managers, it would seem that questioning their ‘posture’ and practices is necessary to allow for the sharing of power and responsibilities inherent in employee empowerment. According to the employees themselves, without a voluntary approach on the part of line managers (at all levels), no change in the managerial model can be envisaged. Several personal development initiatives were mentioned by the participants. However, our results tend to suggest that a change of managerial model does not only imply a change in the ‘posture’ of managers (individual support), but also a commitment of the managerial line to clarify its ‘new’ role. According to Ughetto (2018), ‘for managers, who are increasingly disciplined by large companies to operate in a directive manner, becoming a group leader is certainly more than a conversion to the behavioural catechism of the new organisations. It involves learning, an evolution of skills, which the managerial line must support’ (p. 147). Commitment to a process of empowerment of employees requires the involvement of management as a facilitator of change in close contact with employees, but also the commitment of the higher level in its ability to leave the necessary room for manoeuvre to field managers (Ughetto, 2018). The organisation therefore has a role to play in clarifying the role it assigns to managers and in supporting them to develop the associated skills.
In short, the development of the employees’ technical and interpersonal skills –whether they are managers or not– is a central pillar of empowerment. By being offered and supported by the organisation, this individual support for workers will enable them to acquire the new skills necessary to feel comfortable when taking on additional responsibilities or adopting new roles.
Conclusion
The objective of our research was to examine the obstacles and levers related to individual factors in the implementation of an empowerment process.
The practical interest of this research lies in a logic of change, not only within the organisation studied but also in other types of organisations whose culture is evolving on the issue of management and whose managerial model is in a phase of transformation, with the definition of new managerial roles such as ‘coach’, ‘facilitator’ or ‘group leader’ (Ughetto, 2018). A growing number of organisations –large and small, in the private and public sectors– want to move towards a more participative and empowering managerial model, but do not know how to go about it or where to start. The aim here is to provide organisations with keys to understanding, to enable them to initiate managerial change or to spread an innovative approach already underway, taking into account the employees’ point of view in a perspective of co-construction of managerial innovation. Our research provides concrete management recommendations by indicating the obstacles that need to be overcome and the levers that need to be activated in order to initiate a change towards the desired situation.
Despite these theoretical and practical contributions, our study has some limitations. Indeed, our results were collected in a very specific organisational context –the aeronautical industry– which makes our conclusions difficult to generalise to all kinds of organisation. Therefore, the study of employees’ expectations and perceptions of empowering leadership and the identification of obstacles and levers for an empowerment approach in other French ‘empowering’ organisations could be suggested as a future line of investigation. The collection of comparative data would make it possible to distinguish the elements specific to the industrial context from those that could be generalised to the French cultural context. This is what we proposed in another study (Caillé et al., 2020), by comparing the influence of enabling leadership on well-being at work and the organisational commitment of employees depending on their belonging to a so-called ‘classic’ or ‘empowering’ organisation.
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