Successful Employee Empowerment: Major Determinants in the Jordanian Context

Abstract

Being the most important asset, the human resource represents today the source of the organizations’ sustainable competitive advantage. This focus on the employee as the organizations’ core of human capital management drives the current interest in empowerment. This paper explores the concept of employee empowerment and the main influential factors in implementing an empowerment initiative: job design, transformational leadership, decision-making authority, continuous training and development, sharing information, and self-managed teams. Using a hypotheses testing approach, this correlational cross-sectional field study investigates the influence of the six factors on the adoption of employee empowerment. Using a questionnaire method, data was collected from Jordanian commercial banks. The results of a multiple linear regression analysis revealed that sharing information, job design, transformational leadership and decision making authority have a positive effect on employee empowerment. Sharing information and adopting the appropriate job design inside the organization have the strongest influence in that fostering these initiatives would certainly make banks’ employees’ empowerment successful. The research provides insights into the perception of employee empowerment in the Jordanian context, specifically in the banking industry, a high service- oriented sector where empowering employees become a must for a better customer service.