Factors related to empowerment of women employees in a streotypical job

Abstract

1990s as has been noted as "empowerment era" by some writers {e.g., Hardy, & Lieba O'Sullivan, 1998; Waif, Wood, & Leach, 2004). Empowerment plays a significant role in realizing human potential (Spreitzer, 1992). Right from the initial socialization of a new comer ( Chen, & Klimoski, 2003 ), to growth and even survival of employees in the face of organizational downsizing (Mishra, & Spreitzer, 1998 ), in every sphere of employees' organizational life, empowerment plays a critical role. Conger & Kanungo (1988, p. 474) defined empowerment as "a process of enhancing feelings of self-efficacy among organizational members through the identification of conditions that foster powerlessness and through their removal by both formal organizational practices and informal techniques providing efficacy information." As per Thomas & Velthouse (1990) empowerment is intrinsic motivation manifested in four cognitions (meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact), reflecting an individual's orientation towards his / her work role. In the field of management, empowerment has been studied from four different perspectives, such as structural or role empowerment (Kanter, 1977), psychological or individual empowerment (Conger & Kanugo, 1998; Thomas & Velthouse, 1990; Spreitzer, 1995), relational empowerment (Mainiero, 1986; Burke, 1986) and organizational empowerment (Freeman & Medoff, 1984; Kochan, Katz & McKersie, 1986). In this research we define individual empowerment as employee experienced powerfulness. This research examined the relationship of empowerment to the relational support provided to the individual from various quarters (e.g., family, superior and colleagues) and structural support available to the individual {resource availability, information sharing, work environment, and development and recognition). We also looked at two important work-outcomes of empowerment, job involvement and innovative behavior. We incorporated multi-rater assessment of relational support provided to the individual and the individual's job involvement and innovative behavior by collecting data from the respondent's superior and colleagues also. We have conceptualized empowerment as a broad concept which takes into account intra individual sense of powerfulness coming from both work-life and family life of an employee. We have developed a new construct termed as "control" and tested it as an additional dimension of individual empowerment. It emphasizes that to derive enhanced sense of powerfulness, individual's belief of control over outside - work domain (and not necessarily work domain in particular) is important. Although other ideas have helped to shape this construct, yet especially the dimensions off-the job association with non-work domain makes it appealing to both practitioners and theoreticians. The present research has provided initial support for control as an important dimension of empowerment, in addition to the already well researched four dimensions of empowerment. The data also re- emphasizes the importance of non-work aspects of an employee in human resource studies and organizational behavior area. Our empirical findings show that family support can significantly enhance individual empowerment. This is an important contribution to the existing literature, since empirical support for family support as an antecedent of empowerment has not been tested earlier. Multi-raters as relational support providers turned out to be interesting. We found different types of raters have different perspectives for the same dimension and that influence their ratings. We received empirical support for the linkage of empowerment and tangible work environment, which despite being identified as a major research gap (e.g., Mainiero, 1986) has not been empirically tested earlier. Also, the study shows that different structural and relational factors have different impact on each of the dimensions of empowerment. We chose women primary school teachers associated with elementary education in the schools of West Bengal, India as our sample for this research. Our choice of sample was influenced by Kabeer's (2005) assertion that empowerment studies should necessarily be carried out in those sectors where individuals do not have many choices in their lives. The job of primary school teachers has both powerfulness as well as powerlessness ingrained in it (Maeroff, 1988). Also, women primary school teachers outnumber male teachers in the urban areas of all major Indian states (the present country context of the study) with women's representation varying between 50% to 95% (Government of India). In May 2007, we contacted and visited women primary school teachers located in the states of Gujarat and West Bengal in India. The initial one - to - one interaction with almost thirty teachers helped us to gain insights about teachers' context. In March 2008 , we conducted detailed inter views with seven teachers, who identified the major sources of teacher's powerfulness. The interviews were face-to face and it lasted from one hour to one and half hour. In the interviews the focus was to define empowerment, the factors which help to enhance empowerment (or might be deterrent to empowerment), and the likely outcomes of empowerment based on individual teacher's personal experience. From the information of these interviews, our questionnaire was tailored for this particular research. For face validity and content validity of our instrument, we involved both teachers and experts in the field. Some initial pre-testing of the instruments was conducted on a sample of 288 teachers. We conducted a detailed survey with the final instrument during July till December,2008. A total of 401 teachers from 54 schools participated in the study. On an average, two colleagues (in some of the cases three colleagues) responded per teacher, which resulted in 1026 colleague responses. We received 72% responses from the Individual teachers and 85% colleague responses. All the 54 principals rated their school teachers. We performed detailed analysis of Convergent and Discriminant Validity for the constructs under study. We found Cronbach's Alpha and CR to be well above the cut-off (0.70) for all the variables (Hair et al., 1998) and For nell and Larker (1981) recommended Average Variance extracted (AVE) as a measure of construct reliability to be at 0.5 or more. The requirements for discriminant validity of AVE of each construct to be greater than the squared correlation between the constructs (Fornell & Larcker, 1981) were fully satisfied. Based on the method suggested by Cheung (1999) we first tested for factor form equivalence by performing a CFA for each of the constructs, i.e. superior's support {rated by self and superior), colleague support (rated by self and colleagues), job involvement {rated by colleague, superior, and self), innovative behaviour {rated by self, colleague and superior) etc. independently. In some cases, we found factor form disagreement and in certain cases, we found non-equivalent factor loadings of the constructs rated by different assessors. We used structural equation model to test the hypotheses. The statistical package SPSS version 16 was used to perform inter-rater agreement (IRA) indices view, average deviation (AD), inter- rater reliability (IRR) and intra-cl ass correlation coefficients (ICCs) amongst the colleagues before aggregating colleagues' responses. We found support for "control" as an additional dimension of empowerment. We also found t- hat family support, self-perceived superior's support, colleague support, development and recognition and work environment increased empowerment. Superior perceived supervisory support f or enhancing empowerment did not find support in this study. Also, we did not get support for access to resource in enhancing empowerment of individuals. Access to information for enhancement of empowerment received only weak support. Results showed that empowerment leads to job involvement and innovative behaviour, perceived by all relevant stakeholders.