employees there are other factors which must necessarily be included. Empowerment is not a concept that exists by itself nor can it be implemented in such a manner. For one example, training is an extremely important human resource corollary affecting successful implementation of empowerment. The literature expresses that plants which invest more resources in training have higher levels of performance, “…nearly one in five plants that train more than 40 hours annually per employee reported scrap-work rates of less than 1% of sales,” (ISO 9000, 1997: 2). This analysis will focus on empowerment as an affect of downsizing, with particular emphasis on how best to make empowerment among survivors a reality.
One of the biggest elements in achieving effective empowerment among employees is employee involvement. This cannot be stressed enough. Too often employees perceive downsizing and empowerment as meaning top management wants to cut costs so they lay people off and increase the work load and responsibilities of the survivors without much or any increase in pay. If employees are not handled properly after downsizing, they will feel a lack of trust regarding management and their own position. Spreitzer and Mishra (1998: 1) report that justice perceptions have a definite impact on the responses of employees when it comes to downsizing, and that other characteristics of employment, like work design and employee-involvement level also greatly impact survivor empowerment, “A just implementation (i.e., procedural, distributive, and interactional justice) will result in more trust because survivors believe that implementation reflects their own interests and needs, rather than just top management. A variety of job characteristics will affect survivor empowerment. More motivating work designs (job variety, identity, significance, and feedback), more involvement in downsizing implementation, and less role conflict and ambiguity...