Dennis T Jaffe - Crisp: Empowerment: Building a Committed Workforce (The Fifty Minute Series)

Cover

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Building a Committed Workforce

Cynthia D.Scott, Ph.D., M.P.H.

Dennis T.Jaffe, Ph.D.

A FIFTY-MINUTESERIES BOOK

This Fifty-Minute book is designed to be read with a pencil. It is an excellent workbook for self-study as well as classroom learning. All material is copyright-protected and cannot be duplicated without permission from the publisher. Therefore, be sure to order a copy for every training participant by contacting:

18004427477 Menlo Park, California CrispLearning.com

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CREDITS:

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means now
known or to be invented, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage or retrieval system without written permission from the author or publisher, except for the brief inclusion
of quotations in a review.

1991 by Crisp Publications, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America by Von Hoffmann Graphics, Inc.

CrispLearning.com

02 03 04 10 9 8 7 6

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 90-84923

Scott, Cynthia D. and Jaffe, Dennis T.

Empowerment

1-56052-096-5 (Print Edition)

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EMPOWERMENT

The objectives for Empowerment are listed below. They have been developed to guide you, the reader, to the core issues covered in this book.

Objectives

Assessing Your Progress

In addition to the learning objectives, Crisp Learning has developed an assessment that covers the fundamental information presented in this book. A 25-item, multiple-choice and true-false questionnaire allows the reader to evaluate his or her comprehension of the subject matter. To learn how to obtain a copy of this assessment, please call 18004427477 and ask to speak with a Customer Service Representative.

Assessments should not be used in any employee selection process.

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This book is about the process of creating an empowered organizationincreasing competitiveness and profitability by enhancing the value of the contribution of the people in your organization, work group, or team.

Empowerment is the new buzzword, taken to be the fix-all in the workplace. As every organization goes about meeting challenges and making continual work improvements, they seek the support, involvement, and commitment of their employeeswhat we call the wanna factor. Yet many employees appear to resist and withdraw from these well-intentioned and necessary efforts. This book is for managers to understand and lead people to build an empowered workplace. It demands creating a new type of working environment.

It takes more than a few meetings or a crash program to develop employee involvement and empowerment. It involves both managers and employees rethinking old ways and learning new ones. Whatever name is given to it, the way to achieve greater human involvement in making an organization work sometimes demands a vast shift in the way that you, as a manager, operate. In our experience with both large and small organizations, we find that the manager is a key element in creating this new workplace, sometimes even the initiator and champion of the change.

In the future the major sources of competitive advantage will lie not in new technology but in the dedication, the quality of the commitment, and the competency of your work force. The results of employee energy and creativityhuman capitalis the companys most important resource. Empowerment is the new fuel for the growing workplace.

The process of building a highly committed, highly effective workplace has been given many labels: participative management, quality of work life, internal service environment, alternate work arrangements, open systems planning, sociotechnical systems, work redesign, or self-management.

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Whatever you call them, empowered work relationships share power, responsibility, communication, expectations, and rewards in ways that are very different from relationships in the traditional hierarchial organization. The current environment of competition and scarce resources in business requires managers to behave differently in order to be effective and help their organizations thrive.

This book will help you think about the three elements that make up the empowered workplace:

Each of these dimensions of the organization must shift to create an empowered workplace, or the effort will likely be doomed in failure.