Do any of these experiences sound familiar, or have you (like most people) been missing out on working somewhere that makes you feel empowered? 

Research on the state of employee empowerment tells us it’s probably the latter; one study found that only 36% of professionals feel empowered to do their best work, and that’s a serious problem, both for employees and the companies we work for. That’s because empowerment has the rare quality of being both foundational to running a successful organization in any time or place AND particularly urgent in our specific moment of existence. 

Fortunately, there is a tall stack of research that supports the value of empowerment at work, and that’s worth getting excited about!

Where’s the “exciting evidence”!? 

Let’s start with just a few examples: research consistently shows that when employees are empowered…

• They express higher levels of engagement. 

• Their companies generate more revenue.

• Employees are more likely to be committed to the organization and motivated to do their best work, which means performance improves along with retention.

• Companies are more innovative.

• Organizational citizenship behaviors, like voluntarily helping colleagues, are more common.

• Employees are more likely to report a sense of belonging at work.

We know about these benefits because decades of empirical research exist based on self-determination theory (SDT), one of the most commonly applied models in organizational research since the 1970s. This foundational knowledge about employees’ basic psychological needs and self-determination is a cornerstone of our empowerment work here at Cultivate.

Organizations with strong cultures of empowerment are particularly supportive environments for Cultivators, the people who work hard to create positive change from within large companies. In empowering organizations, Cultivators can thrive, which also means their companies can more easily surface new ideas, leverage internal resources to drive strategic change, and continually adapt to emerging needs and conditions from the grassroots.

Research is also clear that the satisfaction of individuals’ need for empowerment is “essential for sustaining optimal psychological functioning and motivation.” That relationship between empowerment and overall employee well-being is one of the best arguments for prioritizing empowerment in the current employment climate, when mental health has been dramatically impacted by the pandemic, especially among those already disproportionately impacted by racism, heterosexism, and other forms of marginalization.

Unfortunately, despite the evidence supporting the impacts of empowerment and disempowerment at work, embracing empowerment as a priority continues to be a challenge for leaders, managers, and all employees who are already under intense pressure to perform and to engage in a variety of initiatives around other important priorities such as advancing DEI goals, retaining top talent, promoting long-term innovation capacity, or increasing resilience, especially after multiple years of ongoing pandemic stress. 

The good news is, many of these priorities that tend to be treated as isolated issues can all be positively impacted by investing in empowerment! I know that might seem like an outsized claim to make about just one thing, so let me explain…

What we mean when we say empowerment…

One of the reasons we feel comfortable making big claims about the benefits of empowerment at work is that our definition of the concept isn’t just one thing; it’s a multi-dimensional model that’s grounded in much of the research I’ve shared so far. 

The Cultivate Model of Organizational Empowerment includes five dimensions: Skill, Purpose, Autonomy, Community, and Engagement (SPACE).

Our empowerment model is a framework for the second imperative, but it isn’t a prescription for how every leader or employee should behave. It’s a tool for understanding the five things every person in your organization needs in order to feel empowered. There are nearly infinite tactics organizations can use to meet these needs, but the net result of those efforts should be more empowering work environments with all their intended benefits.

💡Model Highlight: Empowerment is surprisingly social

You may notice something a little surprising about how we define empowerment: the community dimension. While concepts like autonomy and engagement conform to the individualism that tends to dominate discussions of empowerment at work, community is different because it represents our need for each other.  

When one Cultivator we know, Stefanie Hausner, set out to empower a large marketing team with necessary project management tools and skills for on-time project delivery, there were obstacles, including team members who actively resisted the change. Stefanie worked with the team to overcome these challenges by focusing on multiple dimensions of empowerment: not only promoting the individual skills to use the available tools effectively but also developing the collective sense of community and connections between colleagues. This allowed the team to see their impacts on one another and collaborate to create “new ways of working together,” resulting in broader support for the initiative and helping the team achieve a 27% increase in on-time project delivery in the first quarter alone. 

This is just one small example of many that show empowerment is a social endeavor. Approaching an organizational problem by narrowly focusing on only the individual dimensions of empowerment can often fall flat, but the SPACE model can serve as a reminder of the benefits of community for driving motivation and promoting grassroots change throughout an organization.

A closer look at the dimensions

Because the five dimensions can all be interpreted in a variety of ways, the SPACE model of organizational empowerment also includes a set of concrete, observable factors that help to describe what each dimension can look like in the context of employees’ actual work experiences.

Expand each of the dimensions below to learn more:

How to use this model

We built this comprehensive definition and model of organizational empowerment as a way to synthesize the large quantity of research on this subject into a simplified list of dimensions that describe, at a high level, what it looks like to inhabit a more empowering organizational space where all employees can thrive.

Actually creating environments that empower rather than disempower employees takes real work from every level of the organization:

• Leaders have to understand the business value of empowerment and invest appropriately in those who are most motivated and capable of shifting the culture (i.e. their Cultivators and communities).

• Managers have to extend trust to their teams, embrace vulnerability, engage in dialogue, build strong cross-functional & multi-level relationships, and adopt the mindsets and behaviors of innovation leaders rather than struggling to preserve rigid hierarchies.

• Employees have to develop the skills and mindsets of self- and mutual empowerment. Build trusting networks and communities. Prioritize collaboration over interpersonal competition. Share knowledge. Manage up. Try. Fail. Try again.

Leaders and managers can use the five dimensions and their various indicators as a diagnostic guide, both informally (as a way to take a mental inventory of empowering and disempowering experiences) and formally (via tools like our Organizational Empowerment Assessment). Anyone responsible for a team, unit, or entire organization can also use the dimensions as topics for discussion with team members around their individual needs for skill, purpose, autonomy, community, and engagement, and whether those needs are being met. The dimensions could also be used to guide a collaborative audit of the available supports and barriers to empowerment in a specific context in order to identify gaps or opportunities for improvement. 

While the actions leaders and managers take to impact the level of empowerment experienced throughout an organization, creating empowering work environments isn’t just a top-down activity. Individual employees without formal leadership roles can also use the dimensions of empowerment as a way to contextualize their own experiences of empowerment or disempowerment at work, pinpointing specific needs. That knowledge can be used as a way to provide both positive and constructive feedback to supervisors and to self-advocate for changes that could increase their level of empowerment and enable them to do their best possible work.

Even without formal authority through a title or management position, employees also empower and disempower each other. Reflecting on the dimensions of empowerment can be a way for all of us to self-assess as we look for new ways to empower ourselves and our peers to take action and change things for the better at work.

On that note, if you’re as excited about the concept of self and mutual empowerment as we are, check out the Empowered Cultivator Lab, our free, email-based course that’s full of content and experiments everyone can use to take some concrete steps toward a more empowered self and a more empowering organization.