Empowerment
Empowerment has become one of the many fashionable concepts in ‘modern’ management. This concept has substance, however, if one follows the questions which are raised within its orbit. What forms can organisations develop in order to usefully link or decouple the fullness of their decisions, to charge them sufficiently with agreement or with possibilities of rejection, to appropriately control them or trustingly allow them to ‘take their course’, to charge them with sufficient competence or recognise incompetence in time, to change or to preserve them, to temporarily suspend them or to ensure their validity, to take the risk of making them, or to leave things as they are, to focus on the quality criteria in the way of time or factual correctness, and to keep a view on the internal or external beneficiaries. Attentive readers will identify the organisational dynamics guiding processes in these questions. The label ‘empowerment’ summarises who, where and how to enable, encourage, oblige, train the making of decisions about these poles. Objectively viewed, the decision ought to be taken there where the factual competence is based, socially the decision should be made by those who are prepared, respectively, to utilise their expertise (conflict-ridden), and temporally the decision ought to be made then when the fitting and suitable moment has arrived. However, as no one can really know who are the experts, where the conflict can be dealt with well and when the suitable moment in time has arrived, organisations have to engage with the complexity of these questions. Therefore, in traditional organisations, social conflicts about hierarchy and structures are usually limited, factually the competence is determined by ascribing authority and temporally the necessity to change is made difficult and bureaucratic. What is interesting is that all these solution variants, i.e. hierarchy, expertise and bureaucracy, have been in crisis for some time, and alternatives to empowerment are tested in functioning organisations: i.e. collegial, lateral, holacratic management concepts (social), design thinking (factual) and agile processes (temporal), to name just three key words.