"[Well managed modern organizations] treat everyone as a source of creative input. What's most interesting is that they cannot be described as either democratically or autocratically managed. Their managers define the boundaries, and their people figure out the best way to do the job within those boundaries. The management style is an astonishing combination of direction and empowerment. They give up tight control in order to gain control over what counts: results." (Robert H Waterman, "The Renewal Factor", 1987)
"Process standardization from on high is disempowerment. It is a direct result of fearful management, allergic to failure. It tries to avoid all chance of failure by having key decisions made by a guru class (those who set the standards) and carried out mechanically by the regular folk. As defense against failure, standard process is a kind of armor. The more worried you are about failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced mobility. The overarmored organization has lost the ability to move and move quickly. When this happens, standard process is the cause of lost mobility. It is, however, not the root cause. The root cause is fear." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)
"Delegation is the handing down the responsibility for action, together with the necessary resources and authority to somebody else, usually low down in the organization. Under delegation, the delegator still remains accountable (see earlier) for the task and its manner of implementation. Accountability cannot be delegated. Empowerment is delegation plus the encouragement of considerable initiative and a degree of accountability." (Roger Cartwright, "Mastering Team Leadership", 2002)
"A strong team makes sure every member has a chance to help form goals. The trend in business is to empower teams with more authority. The logic The clearer the vision of where you’re going, the easier it will be to get there is simple. The more involved you are in forming a goal, the more you have at stake to see it fulfilled." (Teamwork Skills 3rd Ed.,2009)
"Empowerment is what managers do to people. Engagement is what managers do with people." (Henry Mintzberg, "Simply Managing: What Managers Do - and Can Do Better" , 2013)
"The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete." (Peter Thiel, "Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future", 2014)
"A software team can get severely constrained when a velocity target is imposed on it. Velocity works well as a measurement, not as a target. Targets limit choice of actions. A team may find itself unable to address technical debt if it is constrained by velocity targets. At a certain threshold of constraints, team members lose the sense of empowerment (autonomy)." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Strategic coherence is more important than strategic precision in an uncertain world. It is impossible to get everything right because of market volatility, but we can ensure strategies do not collide. In large, complex organizations where many executives are empowered to launch major change, strategic incoherence can be a big problem." (Paul Gibbons, "The Science of Successful Organizational Change", 2015)
"Organizations that rely too heavily on org charts and matrixes to split and control work often fail to create the necessary conditions to embrace innovation while still delivering at a fast pace. In order to succeed at that, organizations need stable teams and effective team patterns and interactions. They need to invest in empowered, skilled teams as the foundation for agility and adaptability. To stay alive in ever more competitive markets, organizations need teams and people who are able to sense when context changes and evolve accordingly."
