Case study #1: Employee employment at the Bank of New Zealand

1. The situation illustrated at BNZ extract fits the textbook definition of empowerment. Empowerment is the process by which managers delegate power to employees to motivate greater responsibility in balancing the achievement of both personal and organization goals. When Chris Bayliss just joined the company as the director of retail banking, he found out that the employees were controlled and bound by the rules given such as the policy of the company. The company policy has stated the similar roster for all the stores so as to accommodate the staff training, which shows the inflexibility of the bank and the level of freedom of expression.

In this case study, Chris Bayliss had done a great job to achieve empowerment by delegating more power to employees and encouraging them to take on leadership roles in the organization. He builds relationships between employees and employers in a sense by asking opinions from employees such as, “He asked if she would prefer to open earlier and reschedule the training.” They were given a chance to voice their thoughts and most of the branches were given the flexibility to set their own hours according to the country’s retailers. As a director, he would encourage store teams to take initiative in coming up with ideas to better serve BNZ’s customers. I believe this has built up confidence for the employees to speak up and they would be more motivated to work harder so as to improve the company’s business.

In my opinion, Chris has built up a good communication system within the company and the supervisory style has greatly motivated the employees, as there were high levels of participation. As stated in the text, “store managers felt like they had received a promotion. The bank hadn’t really given them a promotion, but had changed their roles. They were now