Aim: This paper explores how skill utilisation is enabled by two aspects of empowerment - psychological empowerment and empowering leadership - and how such enablement reduces perceptions of alienation. These dual processes to achieve potential through enhanced skill utilisation and a reduction in the negative outcomes associated with alienation are viewed as resulting in mutual gains for employees and organisations.
Background and Rationale: In this paper we interrogate the nature of skill utilisation as perceived by employees as one aspect of the alignment of organisational and individual interests within the employment relationship: 'the quality of the match between the organisation's needs for human capabilities and the individual's needs to deploy and develop them' (Boxall, 2013: 3). Such a matching process suggests an equal power relationship between employer and employees whereas, in reality, employers can find 'ways to standardize employee human capital ... and increase the separability of individual contributions through measurement and monitoring' (Islam, 2012: 40). While, from the employer's perspective, the human capital perspective offers positive and measurable outcomes, it may not necessarily resonate well with employees. Yet evidence of negative outcomes from HRM initiatives are increasingly hard to find with topics such as alienation having, until quite recently (e.g. Shantz et al., 2015), all but disappeared from the management lexicon.
Skill utilisation has been widely debated in the broader management literature, yet few studies have explicitly addressed whether or how employees’ skills are utilised. We extend recent research and consider how skill utilisation can be enhanced through a process of employee empowerment. We propose that management behaviours that promote psychological empowerment will strengthen the relationship between psychological empowerment and skill utilisation.
Method: Our study is based on a survey of 915 employees within a large department of the Irish public sector.
Findings: Our findings show that skills utilisation mediates the link between psychological empowerment and alienation. In addition, empowering leadership moderates the link between psychological empowerment and skills. Overall, our moderated mediation model is supported.
Contributions: Our paper makes two main contributions. First, rather than viewing skill utilisation in the instrumental terms adopted by human capital analysis, the recognition of skills by employers becomes the basis for a mutual understanding of the worth of skills and its role in reducing perceptions of alienation at work. This spills over to our second contribution, which brings to the fore how empowerment may alleviate experiences of alienation through optimal utilisation of skills and how this can be further enabled by empowering leadership.
References:
Boxall, P. (2013). Mutuality in the management of human resources: Assessing the quality of alignment in employment relationships. Human Resource Management Journal, 23 (1), 3-17.
Islam, G. (2012). Recognition, reification, and practices of forgetting: Ethical implications of Human Resource Management. Journal of Business Ethics, 111(1), 37-48.
Shantz, A., Alfes, K., Bailey, C., & Soane, E. (2015). Drivers and outcomes of work alienation: Reviving a concept. Journal of Management Inquiry, 24, 382-93.
