Construct · 4 fields · 7 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaningproactivenesscompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to empowerment is proactiveness.
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An individual's felt sense of motivation at work, made up of four cognitions: meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact. Spreitzer built the construct in 1995 from Thomas and Velthouse's interpretive model of intrinsic task motivation, defining empowerment as a person's own experience of their role rather than anything a manager grants. The referent is one worker's inner state, measured by self-report, and it can be high even where no authority has actually been delegated. This is the meaning that treats empowerment as something felt, not something done to a person.[1][2]
A manager's act of pushing authority, resources, information, and decision latitude down the hierarchy so that lower levels can act. Kanter's 1977 study of a corporation located power in access to opportunity, resources, and support, and Conger and Kanungo in 1988 framed empowerment as the practice of removing the conditions that leave people feeling powerless. The referent here is a structural relation between levels of an organization, not a state of mind, and the unit is the grant of authority itself. A person can be structurally empowered in this meaning and still not feel empowered in Spreitzer's.[3][4]
A collective process by which people who lack control over the decisions that affect them gain it, at the level of a group, organization, or community. Rappaport set out this meaning in 1987 as an organizing idea for community psychology, and Zimmerman later distinguished empowering processes from empowered outcomes across individual, organizational, and community levels. The referent is a group gaining control together, not one person's motivation and not a manager's grant. Its concern is the distribution of power in a community, which is why the same word can name a political aim rather than a workplace feeling.[5][6]
The expansion of a person's ability to make strategic life choices in a setting where that ability had been denied. Kabeer defined women's empowerment in 1999 through three linked elements: resources, agency, and achievements, treating empowerment as a process of change out of disempowerment rather than a fixed level of power. The referent is an individual, usually a woman, within structures of gender and development, and the object is the capacity to choose. It shares the word with the workplace meanings but is anchored in whether people who were denied choice come to have it.[7]
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