What Jolito Ortizo say about Empowerment and Core Competencies

In this second selection in our  series " Management Ideas", we  focus on some important human resource management issues:  "Empowerment" and "Core Competencies". These are techniques that  students  employ to better understand the capacities of business environment.

Management Ideas was conceptualized during my stint in the  Middle East. These are valuable ideas that all students need to be aware and, where appropriate , act upon.

Empowerment is a feel -good idea that " an organization is most productive when all its employees are empowered to make  and take decisions on their own". Authority is devolved down to all levels of the organization ; it seems to prove what all sensitive , liberal folk believe should be the case.

The idea is most closely associated with Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor who argued that large companies need to liberate employees from rigid hierarchies if they are going to be able to manage in the fast changing future.  She believed that "powerless people live in a different world and may use oppressive power." She left that women were particularly in need of empowerment because traditionally they had been allocated low status jobs.

Ten years after Kanter's ideas were published , another Harvard Business school professor, Chris Argyris, said, more or less: " Nice idea: shame about the results". Employees were often unprepared or unwilling to assume the new responsibilties that it entails.

To understand why it was not working. Argyris set empowerment in the context of an individual's commitment to his or her place of work. He said there are two types of commitment:
- External commitment or contractual compliance. This is the sort of commitment that employees display under the command -and-control type of structure, when they have little control ovet their own destiny and little idea of how to change things;and
- Internal commitment. This is something that occurs when employees are committed to a particular project or person for their own individual reasons. Internal commitment , said Argyris, is closely allied with empowerment.

Argyris argued that many corporate programs designed to encourage empowerment sent out mixed message, such as "do your own thing- but do it the way we tell you." The result was that employee felt little responsibility for the program, and people throughout the organization felt less empowered.

He suggested that companies should recognize that empowerment has its limits. It should not be a goal in itself but a means to the ultimate goal of superior performance. Organizations should establish working conditions that will encourage their employees' internal commitment and make clear how this differs from the external variety.

Core Competence
Core competencies are the collective learning in the organization, especially how to coordinate diverse production skills and integrate multiple streams of technologies; core competence is communication, involvement and a deep commitment to working across organizational boundaries ;core competence does not dminish with use. Unlike physical assets, which do deteriorate over time, competencies are enhanced as they are applied and shared. There are three tests to be applied to determine whether  something is a core competence:
- First , a core competence provides potential access to a wide variety of markets,
- Second, a core competence makes a significant contribution to the perceived customer benefits of the end product; and
- Third, a core competence is difficult for competitors to imitate because it is a complex harmonization of individual technologies and production skills.

The core competence idea is useful to managers for focusing on the essentials, and also for identifying those things that are not"at the core". Why, management might ask, are these non-essential things being allowed to consume valuable resources?

The drive to identify core competencies has moved in line with the growing popularity of outsourcing. Companies are able to outsource almost any process. But they need to know what the hard core of activities is that make no sense for them to hand over to a third party. In some cases the answer is:very few.

The idea spreads from core competencies to core processes, core business-everything that constituted the essence of what company is and does. Companies are encouraged to focus on their core as a source and untapped potential in a time of rapid change and unpredictability.