This paper aims to contribute to the empowerment literature by providing a concrete definition of the topic and thus a way of measuring the empowerment level in organisations. The tool designed to measure empowerment – resulting from the previous theoretical definition – has been proved to be a scale, fulfilling the necessary properties: reliability and validity. It has been tested on a sample of Spanish firms, concluding that it follows a Normal distribution, whereas 20 per cent of the companies apply a less participative style and 20 per cent could be described as empowered. Measuring empowerment not only serves to know how many companies use empowerment practices but also can be used to delve deeper into relationships between empowerment levels and other managerial concepts, such as the effects of empowerment on organisational change, on quality, or even on organisational performance.
Presents Bruce Lloyd in discussion with Larry Spears, Executive Director of the Robert Greenleaf Center and editor of several publications which developed the work of Robert Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader. This suggested that we need radically to rethink how we relate to each other in our institutions, and that leadership needs to be based, first and foremost, on meeting the needs of others. Not only is the concept of servant‐leadership now being put forward as a good idea in theory, but it can also be justified on the grounds that it produces superior results in practice. It challenges the traditional hierarchical, power‐driven model and replaces it with a more democratic and learning‐focused approach. Spears believes that the next decade is likely to show how more organizations are successfully operating with servant‐leadership and this will inspire others to follow.
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