Spreitzer, G. M. 1995. Psychological empowerment in the workplace: dimensions, measurement, and validation.
Academy of
Management Journal, 38:1442-1456.
Prior research approach of empowerment is behavioral, while this study viewed empowerment more from a psychological lens. It seems that the author mainly adopted the theoretical framework from Thomas and Velthouse’s (1990) work. He just did the empirical part to show that the dimensions are: meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact. He also validated the antecedents of empowerment: internalà locus of control, and self-esteem; and externalà access to information (mission and performance) and reward.
My thought is the framework is not so exciting. Also I wondered the value of the “empowerment” construct. For the antecedents, the environmental factors are related to distributional justice and informational justice.
