The Empowerment of Employees through the Prism of Job Training: The Unfulfilled Promises of Management Discourse
The willingness to grant employees the capacity to act is embodied in the concept of empowerment. This concept refers to the varying degrees to which employees are able to take initiative and participate in work-related decisions. From a critical perspective, empowerment can be regarded as a management discourse that is used to mobilize employee subjectivity and obscure the existence of domination. Whatever the reason, training should be seen as a resource that can increase the empowerment of employees and policy should be designed and perceived as such within the workplace. But how should a training policy be developed in accordance with this way of thinking? How (and to what extent) does this policy effectively contribute to the empowerment of employees? This article tests the discourse relating to empowerment through the analysis of activity within the French subsidiary of an American company that has built empowerment into its management rhetoric. At the organizational level, training policy appears to be in line with other policies aimed at encouraging commitment and employee accountability, albeit within the strict framework of the Group’s strategic objectives. At the individual level, some of the more recently hired employees consider that the company’s training policy has reinforced their degree of empowerment. However, the majority of employees questioned report that they are disillusioned in their capacity to act in an empowered way in an environment where management decisions remain unclear and unpredictable. Employee consent and cooperation appear weakened by these contradictions. Thus, in spite of the privileged position of the company under study, which operates under a regime of shareholder governance where the importance of financial profitability applies to all employees and in which the collective representation of employees is low or non-existent, the empowerment policy fails to achieve its objectives. However, it is not completely ineffectual. Training is a critical test of empowerment. It reveals, in this context, the unfulfilled promises of management discourse and questions its economic and social efficiency.