Debate #2: Employee Empowerment is the Only Way The selected passage discusses the idea of "teaching people to lead themselves" in the work place, or empowering employees to make decisions that will affect the running of the organisation, and ultimately, their careers. The passage asserts that organisations function best when the top management holds paramount decision-making power because it focuses this power to the only body truly capable of making educated, goal-achieving decisions. This view stands open to much criticism. The article states that a specific organisational body must be given ultimate decision-making power so that important decisions cannot be passed off to others. Organising the decision-making process can prevent this problem. The process could be structured so that each department was held responsible for a part, which would involve regular departmental decision making sessions. Each department would then have an employee representative who could bring ideas to an inter-departmental decision-making panel. Decision-making would then involve a network that spanned from each department to all levels of an organisation. The process would be more complex, but would provide objective and systematic decision-making, involving more departments and considering more individual opinions. This would involve more time and energy, but the outcome decisions would ultimately be better. The passage states that "some subordinates" would not be comfortable with decision-making responsibility, and have poor problem solving capacity. This is pessimistic logic and serves a classic example of the clich of seeing a half-filled glass as being half-empty. Focus should be place on those employees who have excellent problem solving skills, would be comfortable, and have the potential to be excellent decision-makers. These are the employees who would logically move to positions of higher authority, and giving them more control and decision-m...
