Employee Empowerment and Its Effect on Job Satisfaction and Work Engagement

Abstract

Employee empowerment has become an essential construct in organizational psychology, whereas its concomitant impacts on job satisfaction and work engagement have not been thoroughly studied in a single empirical framework. The paper is a quantitative study that focused on the association between employee empowerment and two important work outcomes namely job satisfaction and work engagement among a sample of 250 full-time employees who are a representative of different organizational settings in Pakistan. Three self-report measures, i.e., Conditions for Work Effectiveness Questionnaire-II (CWEQ-II; Laschinger et al., 2001), Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire-Short Form (MSQ-SF; Weiss et al., 1967), and Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES-9; Schaufeli et al., 2006), were used to The multiple regression analyses showed that employee empowerment was a strong positive predictor of job satisfaction ( =.61, p<.001) and work engagement ( =.57, p<.001), and explained 37 percent and 32 percent of job satisfaction and work engagement respectively. These results highlight the practical significance of empowerment-based management practices to contribute to the well-being of employees, their motivation, and long-term involvement at the workplace. It is discussed in terms of implications to human resource management, leadership development, and organization policy.