Empowerment: Empty rhetoric or core value?

The concept of empowerment means different things to different people. To many it means little more than delegation. For example, I have sometimes heard managers say: ‘I am empowering my staff by giving them responsibility for this task‛. To others, empowerment is a political term and perceived as part of a struggle for equality and social justice.

Literally, empowerment means giving power to an individual or a group of people but we should be very wary of relying too heavily on a literal definition. Power is not something that can be given in a direct or concrete way, as power is not a physical commodity. Perhaps a better way of understanding empowerment is to see it as a process of helping people to gain greater control over their lives and circumstances. In this way they become more powerful and are thus enriched by the experience.

Unfortunately, empowerment is often used in a simplistic way, with little evidence of an understanding of the subtleties and complexities involved. Much of this confusion comes from the word that is at the root of empowerment — namely power. If people have an oversimplified understanding of power, then it stands to reason that they will have an equally oversimplified understanding of empowerment. What is often not recognized is that there are different types of power:

Personal power: charisma, influencing skills, assertiveness and so on.

Positional power: the power that derives from someone‛s role, position or status.

Discursive power: the power that comes from sets of ideas or assumptions and from forms of language — for example, the power that members of the medical profession derive from the well-established notion of ‘doctor‛s orders‛.

Structural power: relations of dominance that are linked to the way society is structured — for example, in terms of such factors as race, gender, and class.

If we are going to take empowerment seriously as a core value underpinning the promotion of well-being, then we need to be clear on each occasion that we use the term what type (or types) of power are we referring to. If not, more confusion can result, and then people lose interest and faith in the idea. But, why should we want to promote empowerment? What is it that makes it relevant to promoting well-being? Well, let‛s consider the alternative.

In terms of social well-being, the alternative to empowerment is dependency creation where people in need of help and support become dependent on professional help to meet their needs — rather than be helped to be able to address their own problems and meet their own needs as far as is possible. It takes us back to the old days of elitism when the basic principle was ‘we know best‛. It means that relationships between helping professionals and their clients are based on a top-down relationship rather than on working in partnership. In terms of workplace well-being, the absence of empowerment means that people are not supported in maximizing their potential (something that therefore disadvantages not only the individuals concerned, but also the organization as a whole and all its stakeholders too). Lack of control over one‛s work is also recognized as a significant factor in the development of stress in the workplace. People can often manage quite significant levels of pressure when they feel in control of things, but can begin to feel stressed once they feel they have no control (a particularly stressful scenario is when people have responsibility for a particular matter, but have little or no control over it).

Making empowerment a core value in our efforts to promote well-being is therefore a worthwhile undertaking, but we need to make sure that we base our efforts on a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of what empowerment means and not allow it to be reduced to a simplistic level.

Dr Neil Thompson is an independent writer, educator, a visiting professor at the Open University and an adviser to the Vigoroom workplace wellbeing platform (www.vigoroom.co.uk). His Academy at www.NeilThompson.info offers an annual subscription service giving access to 60 of his online courses. This is available to individuals for less than £2 per course or a corporate subscription for up to 300 staff at just £3,000 +VAT.