Power and Participation in the Workplace

Abstract

In the 1980s and 1990s, empowerment emerged as a central focus of research and a practical goal among community psychologists. Rappaport brought prominence to the term with his 1981 article on the subject, where he defined empowerment as the process of enhancing “the possibilities for people to control their own lives” (p. 15). Several authors have built on Rappaport’s initial conceptualization in an effort to clarify the meaning of the term. Emphasizing the implications of empowerment for human service delivery models, Swift (1984) described empowerment as the antithesis of “the paternalistic model that has dominated human service delivery during this century” (p. xi). Empowerment, she argued, “insists on the primacy of the target population’s participation in any intervention affecting its welfare” (p. xiv). Others have described empowerment as a corollary of citizen participation. Kieffer (1984), for example, described empowerment as “the transition from sense of self as helpless victim to acceptance of self as assertive and efficacious citizen” (p. 37). More recently, Perkins and Zimmerman (1995) proposed that “participation with others to achieve goals, efforts to gain access to resources, and some critical understandings of the sociopolitical environment are basic components of the construct” (p. 571). Elaborating further, Perkins and Zimmerman (1995) suggested that at the organizational level of analysis, “empowerment includes organizational processes and structures that enhance member participation and improve goal achievement for the organization” (p. 571). Implicit in all these definitions of empowerment is the assumption that an individual’s active participation in decision-making within the major organizations that substantively influence his or her daily life will engender both an increase in the individual’s sense of personal power and effectiveness, and an increase in the organizations’ abilities to meet the individual’s needs