The Upanishads are said to contain six Mahavakyas-great sayings. One of them is "Aham Brahmosmi" -"I am that infinite". What an assertion! It identifies the inmost consciousness of the individual with that of the Supreme Divine. It poses a question, of course, from a different perspective: Why this comparison -"I am that"; why this longing for associating ourselves with what we think is the highest? The very living, which is a repetitive affair resulting in a kind of crudeness, brutality, making us dull, stupid, and insensitive, might have compelled seers of yore to search for a better meaning of life. Thus came the preaching: Associate with God, the highest, for a quality of refinement which alone can afford meaning, and a purpose to life. A kind of getting empowered, of course extrinsically, to experience a state of absolute, permanent, eternal peace. For this to become a reality, longing for empowerment must come from within; else, externally infused empowerment remains a mere myth.
In the folklore of HRM, there is a grand belief that by distributing power across the organization, managements can improve employee productivity, quality of output, and ultimate customer satisfaction. To better appreciate the significance of this belief in enabling businesses to exhibit "customer-responsiveness", let us take a look at a service-oriented industry like banking. The systems-dominated decision-making process developed during the days of old management paradigm which is still practiced in a majority of the Indian banks, entrusted the decision-making to the top management, while keeping the front line employees, who are directly interacting with customers, shackled to their desks. Yet, these are the employees who indeed have all the information and knowledge about the customers and the expertise to cater to the changing needs of customers promptly. In a service-oriented industry where knowledge revolution is bringing in rapid changes, the old beliefs that top management alone could define priorities and monitor operations through management information systems have become an illusion. Secondly, it is also becoming increasingly evident that the old "systems-driven" model is suppressing the individual initiatives. This increased awareness, particularly in the new economy businesses, is driving the executives towards the newfound "employee empowerment". And thus "empowerment" promoted by the management gurus and marketed by consultants has become the "in thing" of corporates. |
