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Dear colleagues,

Our research team at the University of Iowa (Scott Seibert, Gang Wang, and Stephen Courtright ) is conducting a meta-analysis concerning the antecedents and consequences of empowerment. We are interested in research that takes any perspective on empowerment, from organizational / structural (e.g., decentralized decision making, use of teams) to psychological (e.g., meaning, self-determination) at any level of analysis. We have completed our search for published papers and are requesting you to send all unpublished studies that include a zero-order correlation matrix, including but not limited to, conference presentations, dissertations, working papers (or data), and in-press papers.

If you have any unpublished papers of this nature, please email them to the contact person below. We will use any data that you share with us only for the purposes of  this meta-analysis and will cite the original source in the bibliography.

Thank you very much for your cooperation.

Contact Person:

Gang Wang
Email: gang-wang@uiowa.edu" target="_blank">gang-wang@uiowa.edu
Department of Management & Organization

Tippie College of Business

University of Iowa

W221, PBB

Iowa city, IA 52240

_______________________

Scott Seibert, Ph.D.

Associate Professor and Tippie Research Fellow

Dept. of Managment & Organizations

Tippie College of Business

University of Iowa

108 John Pappajohn Business Bldg.

Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1994

Phone: (319) 335-0844

Dear Scott,

One of my long-standing concerns about the empowerment issue is that many seem to refer to it as if it were a binary process.  That's not been my experience.  SO I've developed an empowerment scale which I have used informally in my work for the past 15 or so years.  Basically it is that empowerment is an analog process ranging from the top to the bottom from

1.       Identifying problems

2.       Analyzing problems

3.       Generating alternative solutions

4.       Choosing a solution

5.       Implementing a solution

6.       Evaluating the results

7.       Deciding whether to continue or not.

In my experience living in and studying Japanese systems during the hey-day of the '80's was that the much vaunted Japanese empowerment systems were very limited, just going down to the third level in the nominal groups, etc.  few organizations like FMC (nee BAE) Aberdeen (UVA-OB-0385) go much deeper and allow employees to make and implement decisions.  MOST organizations call it empowerment when they go down 1-3 levels but then retain the real power deeper down.  My hope is that your study will take into account this analog depiction of "empowerment" and not confuse it with a binary concept (either you have it or you don't).  

Guy Wallace's work also bears.  Guy Wallace, "Empowerment is work, not magic," Journal for Quality and Participation, September,

1993

Best regards,

Dear colleagues,

Our research team at the University of Iowa (Scott Seibert, Gang Wang, and Stephen Courtright ) is conducting a meta-analysis concerning the antecedents and consequences of empowerment. We are interested in research that takes any perspective on empowerment, from organizational / structural (e.g., decentralized decision making, use of teams) to psychological (e.g., meaning, self-determination) at any level of analysis. We have completed our search for published papers and are requesting you to send all unpublished studies that include a zero-order correlation matrix, including but not limited to, conference presentations, dissertations, working papers (or data), and in-press papers.

If you have any unpublished papers of this nature, please email them to the contact person below. We will use any data that you share with us only for the purposes of  this meta-analysis and will cite the original source in the bibliography.

Thank you very much for your cooperation.

Contact Person:

Gang Wang
Email: gang-wang@uiowa.edu" target="_blank">gang-wang@uiowa.edu
Department of Management & Organization

Tippie College of Business

University of Iowa

W221, PBB

Iowa city, IA 52240

_______________________

Scott Seibert, Ph.D.

Associate Professor and Tippie Research Fellow

Dept. of Managment & Organizations

Tippie College of Business

University of Iowa

108 John Pappajohn Business Bldg.

Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1994

Phone: (319) 335-0844

I majorly agree with Mr. Locke on this one.  EQ, SQ, IQ, values, strategies, CQ, memes, Human Capital, Social Capital, Organizational Captial, + IC, EC, etc.  SO many loose applications of terms even among practitioners.  It IS confusing.  And perhaps part of our job should be to bring some practitioner clarity to the concepts we so readily bandy about.  Short, memorable, mutually exclusive, comprehensively descriptive terms.  That would be great.  But I despair.

Reply to Paul Spector:

I think a bigger problem with combining related constructs is that the constructs that people combine and claim to be related are not. Two obvious examples: empowerment and Emotional Intelligence. People just throw things into the hopper and still call the concept by one name which no longer applies and misleads.

Ed Locke



Edwin A. Locke
Dean's Professor of Leadership and Motivation (Emeritus)
Robert H. Smith School of Business
32122 Canyon Ridge Drive
Westlake Village, CA 91361
818 706 9361 (in CA) TEL
same FAX
elocke@rhsmith.umd.edu
http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu
http://edwinlocke.com
"Paul Spector (PSY)" <spector@SHELL.CAS.USF.EDU>

Ed:

     This seems to be a trend of creating what we might call
meta-constructs that consist of a series of individual constructs around
the same theme. We see it with personality and many other areas. Some of
it is justified by the fact that often composites of related variables
will correlate with more criteria than the individual components alone. I
often wonder, though, if these practices really lead to more insights into
organizational behavior. I think in most cases they do not.

     Another side to this is combining related constructs, for example
behavior and intentions to do the behavior, in a meta-analysis and coming
up with a term to cover them all, like withdrawal or attitudes. This is
just confusing the issue and leads to results that are inconclusive.

Paul E. Spector
Department of Psychology
University of South Florida
Tampa, FL 33620
(813) 974-0357 Voice
(813) 974-4617 Fax
spector@shell.cas.usf.edu
website http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~spector

On Mon, 6 Apr 2009, Edwin Locke wrote:

>
> Beware of bad definitions--empowerment people are enlarging the meaning to
> cover stuff like self-efficacy--to me this is cheating because people who
> are empowered may or may not have high efficacy--the literal meaning is
> giving more autonomy or responsibility.  E. L.
>
> (P.S. the EI people pull the same trick)
>
>
>
> Edwin A. Locke
> Dean's Professor of Leadership and Motivation (Emeritus)
> Robert H. Smith School of Business
> 32122 Canyon Ridge Drive
> Westlake Village, CA 91361
> 818 706 9361 (in CA) TEL
> same FAX
> elocke@rhsmith.umd.edu
> http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu
> http://edwinlocke.com
>
>
>
>             "Seibert, Scott
>             E"
>             <scott-seibert@UI                                          To
>             OWA.EDU>                  OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
>             Sent by:                                                   cc
>             Organizational
>             Behavior Division                                     Subject
>             Listserv                  [OB-LIST] Searching for unpublished
>             <OB@AOMLISTS.PACE         or in-press studies of empowerment
>             .EDU>
>
>
>             04/06/2009 09:44
>             AM
>
>
>             Please respond to
>              Organizational
>             Behavior Division
>                 Listserv
>             <OB@AOMLISTS.PACE
>                   .EDU>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> Our research team at the University of Iowa (Scott Seibert, Gang Wang, and
> Stephen Courtright ) is conducting a meta-analysis concerning the
> antecedents and consequences of empowerment. We are interested in research
> that takes any perspective on empowerment, from organizational / structural
> (e.g., decentralized decision making, use of teams) to psychological (e.g.,
> meaning, self-determination) at any level of analysis. We have completed
> our search for published papers and are requesting you to send all
> unpublished studies that include a zero-order correlation matrix, including
> but not limited to, conference presentations, dissertations, working papers
> (or data), and in-press papers.
>
> If you have any unpublished papers of this nature, please email them to the
> contact person below. We will use any data that you share with us only for
> the purposes of  this meta-analysis and will cite the original source in
> the bibliography.
>
> Thank you very much for your cooperation.
>
> Contact Person:
> Gang Wang
> Email: gang-wang@uiowa.edu
> Department of Management & Organization
> Tippie College of Business
> University of Iowa
> W221, PBB
> Iowa city, IA 52240
>
> _______________________
>
> Scott Seibert, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor and Tippie Research Fellow
> Dept. of Managment & Organizations
> Tippie College of Business
> University of Iowa
> 108 John Pappajohn Business Bldg.
> Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1994
>
> Phone: (319) 335-0844
>

Hi Jim and Ed

I agree too!  I've found that the confusion between terms and constructs is often to (some) practitioners' and consultants' advantage for a range of reasons.  In particular it gives the practitioner strategic ambiguity:  A somewhat undefined catch-all type of construct such as the ones you mention, allow the practitioner flexibility in negotiating products and services with clients.  So, for example, a measure of EI that also purports to assess personality, decision making, stability, managerial ability, flexibility, etc, is likely to sell more easily than a measure of EI which is narrow and specific and true to the construct of EI (well one construct of it).  It reminds me a bit of those kitchen gadgets you see in infomercials which claim to chop, dice, slice, whip, blend, mash, and so on – while they probably sell well they actually don't do anything particularly efficiently.

Another good example at the moment is engagement.  I've had discussions with practitioners who freely admit it's very hard to define or measure but then carry on happily selling their engagement questionnaire or index or tool.  Of course, it's not just practitioner who see the strategic ambiguity advantages of leaving things loose and undefined.  There are many examples of academic writings and constructs that do exactly the same thing for more or less the same reasons.

Cheers

Rob