Employee Empowerment

Definition: Employee Empowerment is a philosophy of distributing power, decision making responsibilities, discretion and/or resources to subordinates, employees or workers.
Knowledge-based companies have a flat organizational structure and a multi-skilled workforce. In such firms, managers should assume leadership and coaching tasks and provide employees (knowledge workers) with the resources and working conditions they need to accomplish the goals they've agreed to. In brief, managers work for their staff, and not the reverse. Empowerment is based on involvement, trust, mutual respect and 2-way appraisals.

More on employee empowerment. More on decision making: Centralization, Chain of Command, Decentralization, Delegation, Employee Participation, more...