Directorate of distance education master of business administration

Lesson 13 - Employee Empowerment & Seperations 
Lesson Outline
 
 
ӹ  The concept of Power and the Process of Personnel 
Empowerment 
 
ӹ  Delegation of Authority and Responsibility to facilitate 
Personnel Development
 
ӹ Retirement on superannuation, premature retirements, 
resignations and other separation processes. 
 
ӹ  The interdependence and inter-linkages of the human 
resource processes of an organization. 
 
ӹ  Concise and comprehensive description of key words and 
phrases being used in the context of Personnel development
Learning Objectives
 
ӹ To understand the concept of Empowerment 
 
ӹ To appreciate the need for effective delegation
 
ӹ To analyze retirement, Lay-off, Retrenchment, Resignation as 
processes of separation
Personnel Empowerment 
 
Empowerment is recognizing and releasing into the organization 
the power that people already have in their wealth of useful knowledge 
and internal motivation. Understanding the concept of power is a 
prerequisite to the comprehension of the contours of empowerment. 
Primarily, the term ‘Power’ refers to an individual’s capacity to influence 
the behavior and attitudes of others. This usually also results in the 
ability to influence events, decisions and possessions. It can be used 
productively or destructively. Empowerment means giving or restoring 
a person or a group more power. Oxford Dictionary describes the word 
empower to mean endowing with the ability or power required for a 
purpose or task. Empowerment could be facilitated by providing people 

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the access to information and resources and ability to share their views 
to impact their own as well as organization’s future. 
Only the people, through education, coalition building, 
community organizing, resource development, or advocacy assistance, 
might be able to achieve empowerment for themselves. A mediator, who 
can work with the lower power person or group to help them represent 
themselves more effectively, can also achieve it. The word empowerment 
also refers to authorization and permission to operate on one’s own 
accord to a reasonable extent in certain situations without having to get 
approval from anyone else. It is sometimes described that empowerment 
seeks to restore in employees a sense of their own value and strength and 
their own capacity to handle life’s problems. Management writer Tom 
Peters considered empowerment as a necessary condition to improve zest, 
creativity and automatic symbiosis with the customers. Empowerment 
involves giving employees a greater degree of control in organizational 
operations through management’s participation. 
Personnel Empowerment is a trust-based relationship. It can be 
described as a way of working together that is fundamentally different 
from the traditional notion of top-down command and external 
control.  It is a condition that entails vesting greater degrees of self-
determination, responsibility and trust in all employees so as to support 
and liberate people rather than diminish their range of thought and 
action. Paradoxically, in an empowered workplace, people tend to feel 
both freedom and self-control. Thus, empowerment leads to a situation 
in which employees’ commitment and engagement would be released to 
such an extent that even an ordinary personnel achieves extraordinary 
performance.