Team Participation and Empowerment: A Multilevel Perspective

In this chapter, we review and integrate the literatures on team empowerment and team participation. We first delineate the individual and collective phenomena that underlie team empowerment and participation, and suggest that the two constructs collectively capture psychological and behavioral aspects of team engagement, respectively. Second, we delineate a multilevel framework that includes individual-level, team-level, and organizational-level antecedents and outcomes of team empowerment and participation. In building this framework, we propose that adopting a multilevel perspective that considers both emergent and contextual phenomena can enhance our understanding of the bases for, as well as nature and function of, team empowerment and participation. Following this framework, we end the chapter by suggesting a set of research questions that can help extend the current state of knowledge pertaining to team empowerment and participation.