English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Manuscript is currently under review. Please do not cite without permission of authors. Abstract Employee empowerment programs have been widely adopted in the public sector as a way to improve organizational performance. Empowered employees improve performance largely by finding innovative ways of correcting errors in service delivery and redesigning work processes. Failure to encourage innovation can seriously undermine the effectiveness of empowerment programs. Based on Bowen and Lawler's conceptualization of employee empowerment as a multi-faceted management approach, this study explores how different empowerment practices can be used to encourage U.S. federal government employees to seek out new and better ways of doing things. The empirical results show that while employee empowerment as an overall approach can increase encouragement to innovate, empowerment practices have divergent effects, and some may even discourage innovation. 3 | P a g e During the 1980s and 1990s, many American firms adopted employee empowerment programs to help maintain their competitive edge in the face of rising global competition (Bowen A growing number of public management studies indicate employee empowerment is positively related to job satisfaction performance by recovering quickly from errors in service delivery, learning from those recoveries, and generating innovative proposals for redesigning processes and products. Failure to encourage such behavior can seriously undermine the effectiveness of empowerment programs. The link between empowerment and encouragement to innovate is of particular significance in the public 4 | P a g e sector, where goal ambiguity, high levels of formalization, and restrictions on the ability to reward extrinsically (see Rainey, 2009) might dampen or even neutralize the effectiveness of empowerment programs. Based on Bowen and Lawler's (1992, 1995) conceptualization of employee empowerment, this study explores how different empowerment practices influence U.S. federal government employees' level of encouragement to innovate. In this study, encouragement to innovate is viewed as an affective state or experience of feeling felt by public employees (see Locke and Latham, 2004). The empirical results show that while employee empowerment as an overall approach can increase encouragement to innovate, empowerment practices have divergent effects, and some may even discourage innovation. Specifically, empowerment practices aimed at providing employees with access to job related knowledge and skills and granting them discretion to change work processes increase encouragement to innovate. Offering employees rewards based on performance, however, reduces such encouragement. The next section offers a review of the literature on employee empowerment. The discussion then turns to the …

Using Employee Empowerment to Encourage Innovative Behavior in the Public Sector