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Follett and Empowerment: Her Legacy and Our Future

Follett and Empowerment: Her Legacy and Our Future. Dafna Eylon, Ph.D. The F. Carlyle Tiller Chair of Business and Associate Professor of Psychology Harvard University March 10 th , 2006. Agenda. Integrate Follett’s insights with current understanding of empowerment.

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Follett and Empowerment: Her Legacy and Our Future

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  1. Follett and Empowerment: Her Legacy and Our Future Dafna Eylon, Ph.D. The F. Carlyle Tiller Chair of Business and Associate Professor of Psychology Harvard University March 10th, 2006

  2. Agenda • Integrate Follett’s insights with current understanding of empowerment. • Increase our recognition of empowerment contributions and constraints • Overcoming the empowerment paradox

  3. What is Empowerment? • Popular • Face validity • Multiple definitions • Viewed as both a state and a process

  4. Exercise: What is empowerment? • Identify an experience in which you felt either empowered or disempowered. • Identify a situation in which you helped others become empowered or disempowered.

  5. Empowerment Worksheet • What elements contributed to creating each situation? • How did you act and feel in each situation? • Be sure to say what really happened not what you would have liked or think should have happened.

  6. Behavioral Outcomes • Empowered individuals frequently report: • Taking risks, experimenting, trusting, and including others • Looking inwards for improvement • Looking forward to going to work • Speaking well of the org to outsiders • Acknowledging the work of others

  7. Behavioral Outcomes (2) • Disempowered individuals frequently report: • Not sharing ideas with others • Wasting time double guessing • Hesitant to request help • Rationalizing failures and blaming others

  8. Affect Outcomes • Empowered individuals frequently identify feeling: • Recognized, respected, energized, consulted and thanked • Secure, capable, creative, and trusted • Supported by others • Having discretion over work and time • Having good will assumed

  9. Affect Outcomes (2) • Disempowered individuals frequently identify feeling: • Used, ignored, lacking approval or appreciation • Others will be recognized and they won’t • Easier to do things oneself in the short run than to empower others.

  10. Mary Parker Follett • Popular lecturer in the 1920s • Implicit theories consistent with today’s understanding on empowerment. • Believed all individuals wish to self-govern • The role of biz is to develop individuals

  11. Fears related to Empowerment • Fear of empowering others: • Losing control over others • Others will be recognized and appreciated while they won’t • Not being viewed as powerful may lead to job loss

  12. Fears related to Empowerment (2) • Fear of empowering themselves: • Others will expect too much • Need to work harder • Resented by others • No rewards for acting empowered • Punishment may accrue from changing the system.

  13. Empowerment Enhancing and energizing context-specific process that expands feelings of trust and control in oneself as well as in one’s organization, leading to outcomes such as performance and satisfaction.

  14. Follett and Empowerment • Focus on function • All members are equal and must share a common goal (collective action) • Information is freely exchanged • Power and synergy are infinite • On-going process

  15. The Empowerment Process Satisfaction Information Responsibility Active Belief Self-Efficacy Locus of Control Self-Esteem Unique Perf Outcomes Awareness Intervention

  16. Empowerment Paradox • Conditions that allow one individual to empower others undermine the essence of empowerment i.e., one party is superior to another allowing: • Judgment • Providing or limiting resources • Withholding information • Resulting in lack of true redistribution

  17. Follett’s Recommendations • Continuous interactive influence at all levels • Constantly seek and adapt to the law of the situation and functional unity • Remove impediments • Power with and not over • Expect and create the dynamic and dialectic • Norms of respectful reciprocity

  18. The four “M”s of Empowerment • The Micro Level – Individual • The Meso Level – Relational • The Macro Level – Organizational • The Misnomers – Bogus Empowerment

  19. Can all organizational members answer: • Why we do things the way we do? • What do we reward in this organization? • How do I access the resources I need? • What are the mission, values, and goals? • What do we need to achieve our mission, goals, and values?

  20. “Go to the people. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build on what they have. But of the best leaders, when their task is accomplished, their work is done, the people will remark: We have done it ourselves.” Chinese poem.

  21. “Certain understandings between leaders and followers are fragile: the understanding, for example, that real participation is a process of becoming and never arriving. “ Max DePree

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