This chapter presents the relationship and impact of employee empowerment on organizational trust. The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between employee empowerment and organizational trust in the IT industry. This study examines the difference between the empowerment level and organizational level of male and female employees. The questionnaire employed in this study consisted of empowerment by A. K. Mishra and G. M. Spreitzer and organizational trust variables by P. Mishra. The sample for the study consisted of 475 IT professionals from five IT organizations. Simple random sampling was used as a sampling technique, and this study was an ex-post in nature. Data were analyzed using t-test, correlation, and multiple regression. The result revealed that employee empowerment had a positive and significant impact on organizational trust. There is no significant difference in the empowerment of IT industry employees. It means that both male and female employees were equally empowered in their jobs. Male employees are more trust in their jobs as compared to female employees.
TopIntroduction
Employees are the most valuable asset of the organization. Empowerment means encouraging the people to make decisions with least intervention from higher management (Handy, 1993). Employee empowerment starts with the concept of strategic fit between people, tasks, technology and organization structure. Empowered employees depict more trust in their managers. Empowerment practices are often implemented with the hope of overcoming worker dissatisfaction and reducing the costs of absenteeism, turnover and poor quality working condition. Employee empowerment is used as an important tool for understanding of employees about their job role in the organization. Employee empowerment may be subjective by the discernment that the organization thinks about its employees' well-being and that their work is esteemed. Empowering employees may increase job satisfaction. Empowerment influence job satisfaction among employees.
The evolution of trust within an organization will be affected by the history of outcomes that an employee or manager has experienced when trusting the other based on their ability, benevolence, and integrity (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995). Organizational trust is a circular motion of action and reaction. Organizational trust is generating increased interest in the organizational studies. Trust has been the centre of the interest of organizational studies since the mid-1980s with the most research emphasizing generalized trust and confirming its importance for organizational development and success (Cummings and Bromiley, 1996). Trust has been widely recognized as a key enabler of organizational success (Davis, Schoorman Mayer and Tan, 2000). Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt and Camerer (1998) proposed the following cross discipline conceptual definition of trust: “a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another”. From organizational trust (OT) perspective it can be defined as the workers belief that organizations are straightforward in their dealings with workers and follow through their commitments and that the organization’s actions will prove beneficial for the workers (Tan and Tan, 2000; and Laschinger, Finegan and Shamian, 2001).
Empowerment
Involving employees in decision making processes, giving them autonomy to complete their tasks and ensuring them that their work has great importance for organization is called employee empowerment (Robbins, P. S & Judge, A., 2000). Employee empowerment means sharing the information about vision, clarity of goals and defining the borders of decision making process (Nanda, N & Nanda, I., 2009). The construct of empowerment comprise of four dimensions meaning, competence, self-determination and impact.
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Meaning: Meaning is an individual’s belief that his or her work is important to him or her and his or her fondness for what he or she is doing. Spreitzer (1995) defined meaning cognition as a sense of purpose or personal connection to one’s work goal: it is the value of a work goal and an individual’s beliefs, judged in relation to that individual’s ideals (Thomas and Velthouse, 1990).
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Competence: Competence is an employee’s ability to perform work activities with skill, and it refers to the degree to which a person can perform task activities skillfully when he or she attempts to do so. Employees must feel that they are competent to engage in the behaviors required by the environment (Kara, 2012).
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Self-determination: Self-determination is an individual’s control over the manner in which work is accomplished and is related to the choice cognition, as described by Kitayama and Cohen (2010). Such individuals feel that they have the independence to perform their responsibilities; they can make decisions about their work and have adequate authority over the manner, time and speed of their task performance (Hossein et al., 2012).
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Impact: Impact is the degree to which an individual can influence strategic, administrative and operating outcomes at work. This assessment refers to the degree to which a behavior is viewed as making a difference in terms of accomplishing the purpose of the task that is, producing the intended effects in one’s task environment (Thomas and Velthouse, 1990).