Portfolio Artifact: Empowerment in the leadership environment in your organization

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Overall, how empowering is your organization to nurses on a scale of 1 to 4? (1: Not at all, 2: Slightly, 3: Moderately, 4: Very)

Based on the scale, my organization can be described as moderately in terms of empowering nurses. Grossman and Valiga (2009) described an empowering environment or organization as one that encourages, supports and expects continuous development of leadership. Employee empowerment is the process by which individuals feel strengthened, in control and powered to undertake the assigned tasks. The organization empowers its nurses to pursue highest levels of excellence. To ensure that the nurses are well equipped and competent, the organization has a clear on-the-job training program that ensures nurses work in various stations and additional trainings given to provide them with better understanding of organization’s performance. The staffs are also supportive of each other which help to create a learning environment. Communication barriers and failure to clearly identify individual strengths and talents make the organization fall short of the expected empowerment levels.

Identify a few of the “No” responses that you think can be turned into “Yes”

From the leadership environment assessment survey, questions 7, 8, and 16 registered a “No” response. In regard to question 7, competition among group members at my organization is not healthy and productive because it has promoted individualism as opposed to team spirit. Competition among group members has enhanced relationship conflicts among departments given that task variety is low and more routine (Matsao, 2005). Strengths and talents of individual members are less recognized in the organization due to low levels of delegation and inter-group competition. Seniors or supervisors are in charge of most activities with nurses having little autonomy in executing key tasks. Finally, channels of communication are not clear and open because the system is a bit more closed. Idea generation and effective feedback mechanisms are missing as the system favors top-down information flow.

Why do you think the answers to these questions could be changed?

As an organization that is determined to excel in service delivery, status quo cannot be allowed to continue. Competition among group members if well harnessed and controlled can help members to be more innovative, promote cooperation, knowledge sharing and enable members achieve higher productivity levels as a team (Matsao, 2005). Proper and early identification of individual member strength and potential talents is essential in developing leaders who can steer the organization into top performance through effective leadership and rewards that come with such a process (Fulmer and Bleak, 2008). Through this, employees are able to achieve their full actualization instead of joining the competition. The organization needs more leaders in various departments and it can look inward to identify and develop leaders. The need for clear and open communication channels is essential to the organization as they improve efficiency and effectiveness in service delivery. This will enhance customer satisfaction which the organization focuses to achieve.

How could you empower yourself to change those identified “No” responses into “Yes”?

One can be empowered through knowledge where one will understand oneself, organization structure, work dynamics and proper resource utilization. Networking will result into empowerment due to information sharing and learning better ways of doing things. Relationship with mentors will provide skills and expertise sharing with experienced individuals in the organization and industry (Grossman and Valiga, 2009). Promoting teamwork, training power decentralization and focus on employee communication will result into more empowerment and help equip oneself with requisite skills and information to reverse the few negatives in the organization (Harris, 2002).

References

Fulmer, R. M., & Bleak, J. L. (2008). The leadership advantage: How the best companies are developing their talents to pave way for future success. New York, NY: Amacon Books Publishers

Grossman, S. C., & Valiga, T. M. (2009). The new leadership challenge: Creating the future of nursing, 3rd ed. Philadelphia: F.A.DavisPlus Publishers

Harris, T. E. (2002). Applied organizational communication: Principles and programmes for future practice, 2nd ed. New Jersey, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers

Matsao, M. (2005). The role of internal competition in knowledge creation: An empirical study in Japan firms. Bern: European Academic Publishers