Empowerment and Accountability: Evidence from the UK Privatized Water Industry
研究英国私有化水务行业的管理者如何理解赋权，并分析问责实践变化对赋权体验的影响，发现问责在促进管理者参与赋权中起独立且更重要的作用。
abstract Empowerment initiatives have become popular in recent years in programmes of organizational change, but their impact as a practical managerial policy remains shrouded in ambiguities. We attempt to provide a fuller understanding of their impact, firstly by exploring managers' understanding of what constitutes empowerment, and secondly by locating the analysis of changes in managers' experiences of empowerment in the context of their experiences of changes in accountability practices. Drawing on data from interviews with managers and a mail questionnaire, we argue that the experience of empowerment is multi‐faceted, and shaped by managers' attitudes towards it. Moreover we find that accountability plays a more significant and independent role in encouraging managers to engage in empowerment than has hitherto been acknowledged.