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Empowerment

Empowerment, Motivation, and
Performance: Examining the Impact of
Feedback and Incentives on
Nonmanagement Employee
ABSTRACT: Motivated employees play a key role in organization success, and past research indicates a positive association between perceptions of empowerment and motivation. A prominent model put forth by Spreitzer (1995) suggests that two major components of control systems will positively affect employee feelings of empowerment—performance feedback and performance-based reward systems. This Study contributes to the behavioral accounting literature by examining how specific types of performance feedback and performance-based rewards affect three psychological dimensions of empowerment. Results suggest that feedback and rewards affect the dimensions of empowerment differently for lower-level workers than they do for managers. Namely, performance feedback was positively associated with only one dimension and performance-based rewards had negative effects on two out of the three dimensions. In addition, overall motivation was not significantly associated with two of the three empowerment dimensions. Implications of this study are that techniques that work to increase manager perceptions of empowerment may not work at lower organizational levels and, even if successful, the related increase in employee motivation may not be significant.
INTRODUCTION Highly motivated employees are a critical factor in the long-term success of many organizations. Given this, accountants are becoming increasingly interested in how elements of control systems affect employee motivation at all organizational levels. Employee empowerment has been advocated by management and accounting researchers as a way to increase employee motivation. For example, the balanced scorecard concept, advocated by many management accountants, stresses the importance of empowering employees to increase their motivation, learning, and growth (Kaplan and Norton 1992, 1996).Similarly, management...