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ill cut unnecessary bureaucracy, improve responsiveness and therefore boost their overall performance. Clearly, major challenges will be faced by the government in pushing through such innovation which empowers NHS doctors.

Though theoretically sound, empowerment programs are often met with many practical challenges. I will review some of these challenges by asking some pertinent questions which can undermine the success of empowerment schemes.

Are the benefits of empowerment to employees clear? The benefit of empower programs to managers is always clear to employees. They see this as a way for managers to ‘get more for their money’ through increased delegation of responsibility. Sometimes the benefits of such programs to employees are not very clear as they usually do not mean increased wages. Managers can therefore find it challenging to sell the ‘empowerment idea’ to their employees.

Do employees really want to be empowered? Are employees willing to take on extra responsibility? This is major stumbling block to empowerment programs. Usually empowerment results to increased responsibility without an associated increase in financial reward. For employees empowerment means expending some discretionary energy which might not be compensated, acknowledged or appreciated. As such some employees can prefer the status quo where their reward is commensurate to the work they do.

Is empowerment the culture of the organisation? This is also important as certain cultures (work or individual) can make empowerment difficult. One of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions is high uncertainty avoidance and high power distance. These sorts of cultures do not allow for employee empowerment as employees in these cultures loathe risk taking and therefore decision making, and work well under situations where hierarchy can clearly be identified.
Does the work structure actually allow for empowerment of employees? Despite the criticism that has been levelled on Taylors principles of scientific management, these principles are still very useful in many institutions today. Considering a large factory employing hundreds of factory level workers for example, I argue that ‘empowerment’ might be a difficult concept to implement within such an environment given the organisational structure.

When should management ‘hands-off’? Empowerment requires that management allow employees to participate in critical decision making and management should delegate responsibility to such employees. The buzz-word around empowerment is trust. The literature advocates that management should trust employees and allow them the leeway to make serious decisions. This could be problematic given that employees could have limited experience in the area despite training. Supervision by senior management might still be required and this in effect constitutes waste.

Reference to the nursing case study

The case study (nursing case) highlights other potential challenges in an empowerment program in a hospital scene. The case starts by putting primary nursing (a program that empowers nurses, improves their performance and job satisfaction) in a positive light. The case highlights the role of ‘sectionalism and elitism’ in hampering the success of such empowerment programs. Empowerment in the nursing case meant that nurses took full control of their patients本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。