Is empowerment really a new concept?

Abstract

While empowerment has been actively practised, the exact meaning of 'empowerment' or 'psychological empowerment' does not seem to be well considered. We tried to make the meaning of empowerment clear by distinguishing it from similar words like authority delegation, motivation, self-efficacy, job enrichment, employee ownership, autonomy, self-determination, self-management, self-control, self-influence, self-leadership, high-involvement and participative management. Based on our reasoning, we concluded that empowerment is not just a fad, but really a unique concept representing a new managerial approach and that the uniqueness denies substitution with any of the above nouns.