8. Employee Empowerment and Job Satisfaction in IT Employees

The process of giving authority to the employees, to make necessary decision in their day to day work, is known as the employee empowerment (Hass, 2010). In other words, employee empowerment is encouraging employees to make decision with minimal intervention of management (Handy, 1993). Empowered employees will be more efficient and productive than the non-empowered employees (Rana & Singh, 2016). About 70% of organization in todays world have implemented employee empowerment at least for a selected set of employees (Lawler, et al., 2001). Employee empowerment, in service sector in particular received a high importance during the last decade or so, targeting increase the quality of service and customer satisfaction (Rana & Singh, 2016). Employee dissatisfaction, reduction of absenteeism and turnover cost and poor working quality can be overcome by implementing employee empowerment (Rana & Singh, 2016).

Employee happiness, satisfaction and fulfillment their desires are measured of job satisfaction. The employee’s contentment with the organization and their daily duties and responsibilities is a measure of their job satisfaction (Rana & Singh, 2016). Job satisfaction can also be a measure of factors such as general wellbeing, working conditions, stress at work (Rana & Singh, 2016).

Software development is a continues thrive to deliver good quality, better and cheaper products faster (Rao, et al., 2011). Most software development project follow agile development as it focusses on developing solution more quickly and effectively (Rao, et al., 2011). The main theme in the agile development is to adapt and response quickly to changing environment, requirement and meeting deadlines (Rao, et al., 2011).

Moreover, the IT employees are knowledge workers how naturally prefer freedom and autonomy. Employee empowerment is an inherent part of the agile software development. Accuracy and clarity, encourage and support, autonomy and freedom are essential elements of empowerment (Elnaga & Imran, 2014). When encouragement and support is not received from the management nor not enough autonomy and freedom is given by the management, agile teams will lose their balance and fail to deliver their expected outcome or adopt to changing environment, requirement or meet the deadlines (Elnaga & Imran, 2014). This will ultimately lead to poor job satisfaction among employees.