ABSTRACT
The forms of empowerment that empower employees to make decisions formerly made by managers, or to ‘share decision making’ (Bowen and Lawler, 1992), are best described as empowerment through participation. These initiatives cover a variety of arrangements, in the context of empowerment, that are introduced by managers, though with a wider definition might also include arrangements initiated by the workforce aimed primarily at extending democracy. The concern of this book is primarily with forms of empowerment introduced by management, but these wider issues will be touched on later in this chapter. At root many of the case studies and literature assume that empowerment is fundamentally concerned with participation (Foy, 1994; Sosteric, 1996; Marchington and Wilkinson, 2000). 66 Geroy et al. (1998: 15) define typically, empowerment ‘as the act of giving people the opportunity to make workplace decisions by expanding their autonomy in decision making.’
