MGT 300
Chapter 1 and 2
Assignment #1

1. There are many advantages of empowering employees. One advantage companies find in empowering employees is increased performance. Companies that offer pay increase to employees to promote empowerment, for example learning a new skill or taking college classes in areas that will help them, were very successful and experience performance gains. This leads into another advantage of empowering employees because it empowers them with knowledge and responsibility. With the knowledge and responsibility they can use those skills to be able to have self-managed teams. This allows them to supervise their own activities more so than they could have before. The employees have a better understanding of their work and with that they are able to have more responsibility, allowing them to be able to work in self-managed teams. This is an advantage because this allows a company to better utilize its workforce. Employee empowerment does have a few disadvantages as well. One being that it could create a problem with the coordination and organization throughout a corporation, because the decisions aren’t being made by the top managers, who are responsible for the performance of the company and also for establishing organizational goals. This can end up decreasing efficiency which is a big disadvantage to a company.

2. The Hawthorn Studies, was a study designed to test different levels of lighting in the workplace and see how that affected the efficiency of its workers. The test that was conducted on a select group of employees had surprising results that were not expected. The results were that employees were more efficient when the lighting was brighter, this was expected by the researchers. The part that was surprising to the researchers was when they studied employees who were put in a dimly light room to work. These