I’ve always said I’m at my most productive and innovative at work when I’m given autonomy. That feeling of empowerment and trust from management motivates me to help the company succeed because it’s all on my shoulders.

Now there is some research from the University of Illinois that shows autonomy plays a major role in increasing “employee commitment to continuous improvement initiatives.”

“Continuous improvement initiatives are typically bundled with employee empowerment techniques,” said Gopesh Anand, a business professor at Illinois. “We always hear, ‘If you empower employees, they will take care of the improvements.’ But what happens repeatedly is that this employee empowerment is management-driven, and it does not work.”

“It’s a paradox–employee empowerment being forced upon employees by management,” said Dilip Chhajed, a business professor at Illinois and director of the technology management program in the College of Business. “What usually ends up happening is that employees feel they are being forced into doing something that they may not even see as being very useful.”

The research offers three points on how to enhance employee commitment to improvement at work.

• The day-to-day work environment needs to be perceived by employees as autonomous.
• As continuous improvement involves making changes to the very practices that frontline employees use in their day-to-day work, trust in leadership is critical.
• A higher degree of trust in leadership further leads to proactive behaviors by frontline employees, encouraging them to use the autonomy in their day-to-day jobs to seek out and make systematic improvements to work practices.

“Many times, employees end up working on continuous improvement projects simply because the CEO is telling them to participate in the initiative,” Anand said. “But they aren’t really sold on this idea of making an effort to improve their workplace and work practices.”

“Workers need to have a sense of control over their work environment,” said Luis Delfin, a graduate student who co-wrote the research. “They need to be able to decide how and what to do in their day-to-day work. And that’s actually what motivates them to improve. Their buy-in becomes even stronger when leadership provides them the support to do this.”

However, employees shouldn’t think of improvements as extra work.

“Employees can’t think of it as, ‘This is something being brought down upon us by upper management,’ ” Anand said. “If they do, it becomes extra work that they’re not compensated for.”

“The big one for employees is, ‘What’s in it for me?’ ” Chhajed said. “Management is trying to make things more efficient, so what does that mean for my job, my work hours? That’s why employees need to trust that management is looking out for their best interests. If they don’t have that trust, then even autonomy is not going to help as much. Trust is huge, because you don’t want the perception that management is coercing employees to do this.”

Also, management shouldn’t be the main instigator of change.

“There should be some top-down direction in terms of where the initiative should go and what are we in business for,” Anand said. “But there needs to be balance between the top-down goals and the bottom-up improvements.

“It’s like building a bridge from both sides,” Delfin said. “Upper management usually has the vision, but at the same time they’re not the experts on how things get done on the ground. So you need to have frontline employees who have some freedom because you are trying to get all of this to meet in the middle. That means that the leaders in management need to act more like coaches, and less like dictators. You need a cooperative environment where leaders are guiding and coaching, and employees are participating.”

Are you given a lot of autonomy at your job? Or does management dictate your every move and decision?

(Story materials from the University of Illinois. Image via Flickr: Ryan / Creative Commons.)