Empowering employees can bring rewards for HK managers
Activities like delegation, persuasion and mentoring can help find solutions to long-term problems
“Show initiative”. “Think out of the box”. These are phrases we often hear as bosses encourage their employees to be more proactive at the workplace by taking charge, challenging the status quo and initiating strategic change.
At work, taking charge means engaging in a constructive effort to change how work is executed with respect to the job, work unit or organisation.
Although taking charge certainly has its benefits such as improved work performance, many Asian cultures including China also emphasise the importance of renqing (or face) and harmony – characteristics which may contradict taking charge.
But certain leadership styles may overcome this. An empowering leadership style that enables the sharing of power with an employee through greater decision-making autonomy, expressions of confidence in employees’ capabilities, and removal of obstacles to performance may encourage employees to take charge.
How does this occur? And under what circumstances does it occur?
In a collaboration between National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School with Wuhan University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, my research colleagues and I studied 310 full-time employees in China from 81 work groups with diverse backgrounds such as production and operation, project management, marketing, human resources, finance and administration.