Employee Empowerment: The Rourkela Steel Plant Experience

This paper analyses the employee empowerment practices and measures the degree of employee empowerment that exists in Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP), a unit of SAIL. The company, like many others, has been using employee empowerment as a strategy to increase its organizational effectiveness. The dimensions of employee empowerment on which RSP has been focusing are: information-sharing, knowledge development, autonomy and rewards. The study indicates that the organization succeeded to a large extent in its endeavors to promote ‘workplace spirituality’ and has reaped positive outcomes. Thus, one can take a sanguine view about RSP’s efforts towards increasing the degree of employee empowerment as a strategy to enhance the organization’s performance.