Employee empowerment and organizational effectiveness: a comparative study of public, private and foreign banks in some north Indian states

Abstract

The concept of empowerment has gained a lot of attention in present times because of its perceived benefits in the larger form of Industrial Democracy. With the thrust on human relations gaining ground in the last three decades or so, empowerment has been advocated as a measure to achieve organizational goals effectively. Since the last two decades many studies have examined this concept from many perspectives. Researchers have approached the concept from psychological as well as socio-political perspective. While the psychological concept has been concretized to a large extent, socio structural empowerment is presenting the empowerment theorists with a lot of opportunities and challenges. The purpose of this thesis was to examine the effects of both psychological empowerment as well as structural empowerment on the organizational effectiveness of banks. Public sector banks, private sector banks and foreign banks were taken up for the study to facilitate comparison on the basis of ownership of banks .Questionnaires were used to assess the perceived levels of psychological, structural as well as organizational effectiveness of the employees. Competing Values framework was used to measure organizational effectiveness . Data was analysed using correlation, regression, ANOVA, factor analysis as well as discriminant analysis.All the three types of banks reported high perceived empowerment levels, however interbank variations were found between the three types of banks regarding the variables under study. While in the public and private banks organization and job centric factors could explain variations in effectiveness, in foreign banks individual factors were also significant. It can be concluded that organizations need to identify a set of enabling conditions to enhance the perception of empowerment in the employees.