Feldman and Arnold (1989) report that in the early years of Industrial Psychology, the dominant perspective was that organizational inefficiency resulted from the fact that workers were both given a job to perform and allowed to decide how the job should be done. In other words, the belief was that employee or job autonomy decreased performance and productivity and thereby had a negative impact on organizations.
However, the authors note, that existing research slowly and steadily indicated that this view of employee autonomy was incorrect and that, rather than being a negative, autonomy was strongly linked to both organizational and performance benefits. The purpose of this paper is to examine the current research on employee autonomy in an effort to answer two research questions: (1) What is the impact of employee autonomy on the organization; and (2) What is the impact of employee autonomy on worker performance?
Impact of Job Autonomy on the Organization
One of the most current findings regarding employee autonomy and its organizational impact is that autonomy can operate to increase workers' level of commitment to an organization. This finding was observed in a study of nurse job satisfaction conducted by Blegen (1993) who investigated the magnitude of the relationships between nurses' job satisfaction and the variables most frequently associated with job satisfaction.
Blegen's meta-analysis of data from 48 studies with 15,048 workers revealed that job satisfaction was most strongly associated with stress and organizational commitment. However, when data were fully analyzed, it was found that the variable that was most strongly contributive to job satisfaction was job autonomy. Specifically, moderate levels of employee autonomy produced strong levels of job satisfaction which, in turn, were associated with strong levels of organizational commitment.
Another way in which job autonomy affects an organizat...