Empowerment estructural

: potenciando la capacidad innovadora de las organizaciones

Abstract

Companies or organizations have a common element: they are all composed by people, who represent their human capital, their vital energy and ensure their capacity of change. Technical devices and infrastructures are important, but, ultimately, it is people who carry out the developments and changes in favour of organizations, so that they may adapt to their environment and become competitive. At economic, technological, market and human resources levels, the globalized context of nowadays is highly competitive and merely reinforces the value of people. Being motivated, empowered and under a dynamic leadership, people become the element that is capable of enhancing the innovative capacity of companies. Empowerment rises here as a tool that allows to unleash the power of people, converting them into partners in the organization. The main goal of this work is to identify the level of structural empowerment of employees who work for companies with innovative characteristics. An exploratory, descriptive and correlational with the use of quantitative research methods study was designed. Two questionnaires were applied, the first one aiming at characterizing the degree of innovation of the companies (Test de Innovación Empresarial ICT) and the other one concerning the structural empowerment (CWEQ-II). The sample is composed by 90 employees of three companies that were considered as presenting innovative characteristics, in the Viseu district, in Portugal. Results demonstrate the impact of structural empowerment in the sociodemographic and professional characteristics of employees, in the three companies that were considered as innovative, according to four dimensions: opportunity, information, support and resources. These four dimensions actually show significant relationships with each other and contribute positively to the employees’ perception of structural empowerment. Moreover, it was verified that employees who have lower professional experience and a shorter period of employment in companies present a higher level of structural empowerment.

Date of Award	30 Jun 2017
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Célia Ribeiro (Supervisor)