Empowerment

The definition of the verb 'to empower', as 'to give power to' was used as early as 17th century
and has connotations like 'authorise’, ‘delegate’, or ‘enable’. Perkins and Zimmerman (1995)
identify 96 articles on empowerment in the psychological literature from the year 1974 to 1986.
This number grew to 685 articles and 283 book chapters in the next 7 years (1987-1993). The
20th century embraced the notion of empowerment in discussions around the politics such
notable as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela. And between the mid-1980’s to
1990’s, Management researchers and practitioners (Conger & Kanungo 1988,Eylon & Au
1999,Psoinos & Smithson 2002,Spreitzer et al. 1997,Zimmerman 2000) adapt the empowerment
concept as psychological-empowerment (as at 2000, there were 1991 articles cited in the
business periodicals index that referred to empowerment. Hardy and Sullivan (1998) suggest we
were then in the ‘empowerment era’.

The notion of empowerment has been interchangeably referred to as self or psychological

empowerment. Psychological empowerment is defined as a motivational construct manifested in
four cognitions: meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact. Together these four
cognitions reflect an active, rather than a passive, orientation toward a work role (1992). The
study conducted by Doll et al. (2003) considers a type of empowerment different to
psychological or self and was referred to as the user-empowerment in computer mediated
environments. User-empowerment is an integrative motivational concept that is based on four
cognitive task assessments reflecting an individual’s orientation to his/her computer-mediated
work (Doll et al. 2003). These task assessments include user autonomy (Brancheau et al.
1996,Venkatesh & Vitalari 1992), computer self-efficacy (Compeau & Higgins 1995b,Marakas
et al. 1998), intrinsic motivation (Davis 1993,Venkatesh 1999), and perceived usefulness (Davis
1989).

Literature Review Strategy

We reviewed the empowerment literature and categorised into: empowerment studies cited
within IS literature and non-IS literature e.g. mental health, sociology, psychology, and
education. The scope of this study is restricted to the empowerment within the ES context. With
the aim of identifying varying perspectives on empowerment, the literature was next classified
into studies that focus on (i) antecedents and consequences of empowering ‘employees’, labelled
as ‘factor’ based studies, and (ii) the role and impact of leadership upon the empowerment
process, labelled as ‘explanatory’ studies. Only few empowerment studies specifically address IS
workers. Most studies address empowerment as a motivational concept in workplace across
varied industry sectors (e.g. community care and health, manufacturing, banking, and
engineering).

The strategy of simultaneously reviewing and classifying the literature within the context of IS
proved effective, revealing a further pattern of three main perspectives of empowerment: (i)
interpretive, (ii) psychological, and (iii) relational. Figure 2 below illustrates the top-down
process of classifying the literature along with some example studies. Each of these perspectives
are described next.
Figure 2: Process of categorising the Empowerment literature

The interpretive perspective describes empowerment as the intrinsic task motivation meaning to
enable rather than merely to delegate (Conger & Kanungo 1988) and suggests empowerment as
intrinsic motivation manifested in four cognitions reflecting an individual's orientation to his or
her work role: meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact.

The psychological perspective is validated by Spreitzer et al. (Spreitzer et al. 1997) and possibly
is an outcome of the relational empowerment perspective. The relational perspective is the one
that encompasses research on user involvement (Kappelman & Guynes 1995), participative
management, employee involvement, decision-making, and power distribution (Dachler &
Wilpert 1978).

To the best of our belief this is the first study that presents distinctions amongst broad
perspectives on empowerment. This Phase I utilised Nvivo during the initial classification of
literature and revealed clusters through the concept maps (Gregorio 2000). The literature was
studied from a number of angles for example based on: types of study, unit of analysis, focus
discipline, methodology applied, overall theme of study, and common constructs across studies
etc. This strategy to review and classify literature is distinctive and is a contribution to
undertaking literature review on a topic which consists of perplexing viewpoints.