ABSTRACT
Initiatives in the management of employees that claim to be empowering have much in common with other techniques, such as employee involvement and employee participation (Siegall and Gardner, 2000). Many of the forms that are introduced under the name of empowerment are both varied, covering a wide range of initiatives, and shared by forms which claim to be involving and participatory. That said, one of the defining features of empowerment, and a core feature of any claim to be different from involvement and participation, is that empowerment is supposed to produce a psychological state. Empowerment by definition needs people to feel empowered (Heslin, 1999).
