Empowerment

According to Chris Argyris, human beings can commit themselves in two fundamentally different ways: Externally and Internally. Both are valuable in the workplace, but only internal commitment reinforces empowerment.

If management wants employees to take more responsibility for their own destiny, it must encourage the development of internal commitment. As the name implies, internal commitment comes largely from within. The more that top management wants internal commitment from its employees, the more it must try to involve employees in defining work objectives, specifying how to achieve them, and setting stretch targets.

External commitment is a psychological survival mechanism for many employees – it is a form of adaptive behavior that allows individuals to get by in most work environments.

Realize that external and internal commitment can coexist in organizations but that how they do so is crucial to the ultimate success or failure of empowerment in the organization. External commitment is all it takes for performance in most routine jobs. Unnecessary attempts to increase empowerment only end up creating downward spirals of cynicism, disillusionment, and inefficiencies. As a first precaution, distinguish between jobs that require internal commitment and those that do not.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: You can empower all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot empower all of the people all of the time.