توانمندسازی روانشناختی و رابطه آن با اعتماد در مدیران فوری

This paper examines the relationships between overall psychological empowerment, as well as its four aspects (meaning, impact, self-determination, and competence) as Spreitzer identifies, and bank managers' cognition and affect-based trust in their immediate managers. Certain demographic factors are taken into consideration as control variables to determine their effect on the relationship between psychological empowerment and trust. 220 bank managers in Ankara, Turkey participated in this study. The results show a significant relationship between cognition-based trust in immediate managers and overall psychological empowerment. Although cognition-based trust relates to meaning and competence aspects, affect-based trust is related to impact only. This study shows no relationship between any type of trust in immediate manager and self-determination. With demographic as control variables, only position has an impact on psychological empowerment.

A review of the literature shows that empowerment receives wide recognition as an important subject in management practices for several reasons. First, personnel empowerment is one of the fundamental elements of managerial and organizational effectiveness and that effectiveness increases when power and control are shared (Keller and Dansereau, 1995). Another reason is that some literature reports empowerment to be a facilitating factor in responding to environmental changes at the right time, such as meeting customer demands on time and increasing their satisfaction. Bowen and Lawler (1992: 33–34) stress that empowered employees become a great source of service ideas. Empowered employees not only respond to customer needs directly during service delivery but also deal with dissatisfied customers during service recovery. Bowen and Lawler consider employees' increased job satisfaction, warmer and more enthusiastic interaction with customers and customer retention through word-of-mouth advertisement as the major benefits of personnel empowerment. The third reason why interest in the concept of empowerment has grown is the “beneficial results” of personnel empowerment, which in some studies have shown increases in sales and profit, cost reduction, higher customer satisfaction, fewer customer complaints, increased loyalty to the organization, increased effectiveness, higher numbers of customers, effective problem solving (as well as problem prevention) and increased coordination between functions (e.g., Spreitzer, 1995, Fulford and Enz, 1995, Klagge, 1998, D'anunzio and McAndrew, 1999, Siegal and Gardner, 2000, Sigler and Pearson, 2000, Niehoff et al., 2001 and Alan and Sashkin, 2002). What factors influence empowerment? Some researchers argue the importance of trust among employees as one of the conditions for the success of empowerment practices (e.g., Mishra and Spreitzer, 1998, Andrews, 1994, Mayer et al., 1995, Owen, 1996 and Harari, 1999). A manager's trust in an employee, in particular, may be a prerequisite for the success of empowerment since trust is an attempt to enhance the efficacy of the employee. However, the literature rarely deals with the issue of an employee's trust in a manager and this approach reflects the traditional paradigm, which views trust from the perspective of the manager rather than that of the employee. This study examines the relationships between the individuals' perceptions of psychological empowerment and their cognition and affect-based trust in their immediate managers.

The results provide previously unavailable information regarding bank managers' perceptions of empowerment. One of the major findings of this study is that a significant relationship exists between the overall psychological empowerment perceptions of individuals and their cognition-based trust in their immediate managers. This result supports the studies that emphasize the importance of trust as one of the factors influencing empowerment practices. (e.g., Andrews, 1994, Harari, 1999, Mayer et al., 1995, Mishra and Spreitzer, 1998, Laschinger, 2004 and Owen, 1996). As Koberg et al. (1999) stated trust tends to enhance communication, provide opportunities for effective problem solving and encourage individual discretion; thus, trust enables individuals to feel empowered. The current study results indicate that individuals' cognition-based trust in their immediate managers provides a positive psychological empowerment. When belief in the immediate manager's reliability, dependability and competence increases, overall psychological empowerment increases as well. This result might mean that as individuals become aware of the fact that their personal goals can only be reachable with the cooperation of others (especially the immediate managers) and when the employees believe that their immediate managers are competent, reliable, responsible and dependable, they will probably view their managers as willing to help them to complete their tasks without error and on time, which increases the perception of psychological empowerment. Moye et al. (2005) state that trust contributes to a positive working environment characterized by supportive relationships. Since trust is a salient component of well functioning organizations (Lane, 1998 — cf Moye et al., 2005), this finding can provide bank managers with a useful framework for analyzing the concept of trust as a contribution to individuals' perceptions of empowerment. This is one of the fundamental factors of managerial and organizational effectiveness. Including demographic factors in the analysis as control variables reveals that the position held by the respondents at the bank relates to overall psychological empowerment and its self-determination and impact aspects, but does not relate to the relationship between psychological empowerment and trust. In other words, although position does not act as a moderator on the relationship between psychological empowerment and trust, position has a direct and positive effect on overall psychological empowerment. This result is similar to Denmark's (1993) finding: the higher the status, the more empowered individuals perceive themselves. Thus, respondents in higher managerial bank positions, who traditionally hold the most power, feel more empowered. Managerial positions in banks are important in terms of the ability to use and control resources and organizational opportunities, and most important of all, in terms of the feeling of having power in the work place. Although a higher position does not necessarily provide more power or awareness of power, for bank managers, in particular, this is position-strengthening. This result seems to be more meaningful if one considers Hofstede's power distance component of cultural variability, which refers to the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations within a country expect and accept that power distribution is unequal (Hofstede, 1980). In high power distance cultures, individuals are more accustomed to centralized authority while individuals from low power distance cultures are accustomed to being treated as equals, being consulted, working in decentralized organizations, and having authority delegated to them (Hofstede, 1993). According to Hofstede's results, the United States, Great Britain, Finland and Germany are examples of low power distance nations, whereas Mexico, India, Japan and France are examples of countries that have high scores on the power distance index. In this index, Turkey is relatively on the high power distance side. One may assert that in high power distance countries, the higher the position in the organization, the more empowered the person who holds that position is likely to feel. Thus, the first suggestion for further studies would be to investigate differences in individuals' empowerment perceptions based on their cultural background. In order to identify the relationships between each of the psychological empowerment aspects (meaning, self-determination, competence and impact) and cognition and affect-based trust of bank managers, the study applies regression analysis for each aspect of psychological empowerment, taking affect and cognition-based trust as the independent variables and demographic factors (education, tenure with current manager, gender, years of work experience, position and age) as control variables. In this study, trust in immediate manager relates significantly to only three aspects of psychological empowerment. Further analysis revealed that cognition-based trust is positively related to the meaning and competence aspects of psychological empowerment, while affect-based trust is a significant predictor of the impact aspect. The meaning aspect of empowerment refers to the degree to which the employees value their work in relation to their own ideals and standards as well as the degree to which the requirements of work fit the employees' own beliefs, values and behavior. For that reason, when employees' cognition-based trust in their immediate managers increases, they find their work more meaningful in relation to their own standards. Cognition-based trust in immediate manager is also a predictor of the competence aspect of psychological empowerment. Some authors conceptualize competence as self-efficacy and define it as the cognitively perceived capability of the self (e.g., Conger and Kanungo, 1988). Bandura (1977: 79) explained self-efficacy as “the conviction that one can successfully execute the behavior required to produce the outcomes”. As self-efficacy is mainly the cognitive judgment of one's capability and competence, cognition-based trust in immediate manager can also be seen as a process of enhancing feelings of self-efficacy. When employees consider their managers' performance as excellent and reliable they are more likely to feel that they will get advisory support whenever they need it. Another important finding is that affect-based trust is a significant predictor of the impact aspect of psychological empowerment. Affect-based trust builds from emotional ties, interpersonal interests and support between individuals (Costigan et al., 1998), and the impact aspect of empowerment relates to the perception of being able to “make a difference” at work (Thomas and Velthouse, 1990). This finding shows that when interests and positive emotional ties between subordinates and their managers increase, the subordinates' belief in their own influence on certain strategic and administrative outcomes in their work unit increases as well. The findings show no relationship between any kind of trust and the self-determination aspect of psychological empowerment. Self-determination is an individual's sense of having a choice in initiating and regulating actions (Spreitzer, 1995). Subordinates with high self-determination often feel that they have the autonomy to determine how to perform their jobs. Thus, one may consider that the self-determination aspect of psychological empowerment relates to some internal factors like personality characteristics rather than trust in the manager, which seems to be an external factor. Hence, another suggestion for further research would be to investigate the relationship between certain personality factors and the self-determination aspect of psychological empowerment. The sample in this study consists of managers in the banking sector, who may feel autonomous when performing their jobs. This situation could be one of the limitations of this study. Thus, the other studies may compare these results with similar research based on non-managers. Compared to other research results which tried to identify the antecedents of feelings of empowerment (e.g., Spreitzer, 1996), the R2 values of this study, which express the total variation that accounts for by the current regression models, may not be impressive although trust variables are statistically significant. This result indicates that some other factors, aside from trust variables, might have an effect on psychological empowerment. Most empowerment research includes only a few independent variables in isolation from the others. However, Koberg et al. (1999) indicates that many factors influence empowerment and classifies these factors as individual (e.g., tenure, age, gender, self-concept, locus of control, self-efficacy, self-esteem), group (e.g., leader approachability, group effectiveness, worth of group, mutual influence, trust) and organizational (e.g., position in the hierarchy, organizational climate) characteristics. Thus, further studies can investigate the effects of other factors together with trust as classified by Koberg et al. (1999). In order to understand the impact of trust reciprocity on the feeling of empowerment, further studies may include not only the trust of employees in their managers, but the managers' trust in their subordinates. Moreover, since trust is an extremely complex and dynamic phenomenon, future studies may undertake the determination of trust among managerial levels and its impact on the feeling of psychological empowerment of subordinates. Additionally, future research seems to be necessary to establish the external validity of our model. Research on psychological empowerment–trust relationships could also include a broader range of sectors and other populations in order to make generalizations.