The Level of Psychological Empowerment in Indian Managers

Abstract

In the evolution of strategic HRD, empowerment is one of the six strategies outlined for planned change. Empowerment in most organizations remains a fashionable jargon, which is one of those desirable issues that is difficult to implement. The current research study is an endeavour to address the need for empirical research on psychological empowerment. The study has been conducted on 312 randomly chosen managers from 17 Indian organizations, on whom Spreitzer’s 1995 psychological empowerment scale was administered. The analysis was conducted on 244 completed questionnaires. There were two phases of data analysis. The unit of analysis for the first phase was the Individual manager, where mean and standard deviation of sub-variables of the empowerment variables were arrived at. Further correlation between the sub-variables was looked at for a detailed perspective of psychological empowerment. In the second phase of analysis, industry sectors were taken as the unit of analysis. Bivariate analysis was conducted on the sample to arrive at differences in the various sectors. The current research study has been significant in demonstrating moderate levels of psychological empowerment in 244 Indian managers and in different industry sectors with empowerment being lowest for the power sector, and towards the higher side in pharma and IT sectors. The researchers suggest future research to focus at contextual factors of strategic human resource roles affecting organizational commitment of Indian managers. This relationship may be moderated by psychological empowerment and organizational learning capability.