Empowerment: The Emperor’s New Clothes by Chris Argyris

Argyris believes that major changes programs are rife with inner contradictions. The current advice for promoting organizational change has four steps:

\- Define a vision

\- Define resulting competitive strategy

\- Define the work processes

\- Define job requirements

In the end, this means you are defining employee actions from the outside and the resulting behaviour cannot be empowering and liberating. You get a “do your own thing — the way we tell you” system.

CEOs generally undermine empowerment as they link empowerment with tight job requirements and controlled processes. Argyris argues this does not lead to an environment that is empowering but one that is foolproof. Often champions are appointed but the employee will see that person as somebody who wants to sell the empowerment to them, top down, where they would come themselves if they were internally committed.

Employees have their doubts and commitment can be said to be a psychological survival mechanism. In east germany for example, employees learned to survive by complying. It can then be very threatening to suddenly be asked to be internally commited and no longer controlled from the outside. The longer you have external commitment, the harder it is to move to an internal system. A reward system will also rather create dependency and not empowerment. Empowerment might just be too much work for a lot of people.

Change preferessionals inhibit empowerment in many cases as they have a conflict of interests inherent in empowerment. Once the initial excitement wears down, employees will have problems and when they do, they will want to ask their managers, which is ok, but goes against the idea of empowerment.

When change is started without the limitations of empowerment being recognized.