Empowerment, Motivation, and Performance: Examining the Impact of Feedback and Incentives on Nonmanagement Employees

Abstract

Motivated employees play a key role in organization success, and past research indicates a positive association between perceptions of empowerment and motivation. A prominent model put forth by Spreitzer (1995) suggests that two major components of control systems will positively affect employee feelings of empowerment—performance feedback and performance-based reward systems. This experimental study contributes to the behavioral accounting literature by examining how specific types of performance feedback and performance-based rewards affect three psychological dimensions of empowerment. Also, we use a relatively simple context to investigate whether predictions validated on surveys of managers also hold for lower-level workers. Our results suggest that feedback and rewards affect the dimensions of empowerment differently for lower-level workers than they do for managers. Namely, performance feedback was positively associated with only one dimension and performance-based rewards had negative effects on two out of the three dimensions. In addition, overall motivation was not significantly associated with two of the three empowerment dimensions. Implications of this study are that techniques that work to increase manager perceptions of empowerment may not work at lower organizational levels and, even if successful, the related increase in employee motivation may not be significant.

Antecedents and Consequences of Individual Performance: Analysis of Turnover Intention Model (Empirical Study of Public Accountants in Indonesia)

“…The role ambiguity relates to performance consequences which cannot be predicted, that has deficiency of information on the expected role of behavior. Drake et al (2007) state that employees who have the motivation at work has a key role in the organizations' success which has been indicated by previous studies on a positive relationship between empowerment and motivation. In his prominent model, Spreitzer (1996) argues that the control system affects the feeling of empowerment, performance feedback and reward systems, thus the workers who feel empowered will have high motivation to improve their performance.…”

“…The Influence of Auditors' Empowerment, Innovation and Professionalism on Role of Ambiguity: Drake et al (2007) define empowerment as the intrinsic motivation that appears in the four cognitions reflecting an individual's orientation toward work roles in the sense of meaning, competence, selfdetermination and impact. Wetzel et al (2000) have found that empowerment negatively affects the role ambiguity due to the relatively low level of expertise so that difficulties can be overcome in understanding superiors' orders.…”

Be Proactive as Empowered? The Role of Trust in One's Supervisor in Psychological Empowerment, Feedback Seeking, and Job Performance

“…The concept of psychological empowerment has attracted extensive attention because of the beneficial results it offers for work‐related outcomes, which include increases in performance, higher job satisfaction, increased commitment, less job‐related strain, and reduced turnover intention (e.g., Drake, Wong, & Salter, ; Koberg, Boss, Senjem, & Goodman, ; Liden et al., ; Meyerson & Kline, ; Seibert et al., ; Sigler & Pearson, ; Spreitzer, ; Spreitzer, Kizilos, & Nason, ). Approaching empowerment from employees’ perceptions, Conger and Kanungo () shifted the concept from managerial activities and practices to the subordinates’ level by defining empowerment as a motivational concept of self‐efficacy.…”

Strategy Selection, Surrogation, and Strategic Performance Measurement Systems

“…Prior work on surrogation, as well as much of the prior research on strategic performance measurement systems (e.g., see Lipe and Salterio [2000] and Banker, Chang, and Pizzini [2004]), focus on settings in which managers make decisions regarding an assigned strategy. However, managers’ interaction with strategy often extends beyond mere implementation to include strategy formulation and selection (Giles [1991], Kaplan and Norton [1992, 1996], Sterling [2003], Drake, Wong, and Salter [2007], Malshe and Sohi [2009], Kauffman [2010]). This raises the natural question of whether managers’ surrogation of strategic constructs generalizes to settings in which managers are involved in strategy selection.…”