نقش توانمندسازی کارکنان برای پیشرفت مستمر: یک ارائه دهنده خدمات مالی The role of employee empowerment in the implementation of continuous improvement: Evidence from a case study of a financial services provider

1. Introduction Today, few companies can survive in their market environment by maintaining their status quo (Kofoed et al., 2002; Swartling and Olausson, 2011). The ability of an organisation to stay flexible and responsive towards changing conditions requires continuous improvement (CI), leading to a dynamic company culture whose natural state is centred around incremental change and improvement (Hong et al., 2014). CI is defined as a bundle of principles, activities and tools within a company that aim to generate a planned and systematic improvement process of incremental and ongoing change (Lillrank et al., 2001; Kofoed et al., 2002). Through this ongoing change, CI aims to eliminate sources of imperfection within a company based on a high degree of employee participation to improve the quality of products and processes, and thus enhance the company’s performance (Imai, 1986; Kofoed et al., 2002; Wynder, 2008; Singh and Singh, 2013). However, after great enthusiasm at the beginning of a CI initiative, most programmes lose momentum and management realises that few of the intended principles and behavioural patterns have become institutionalised within the company (Swartling and Olausson, 2011). Among other potential reasons, studies by Kotter (1995), Lillrank et al. (2001), Angell and Corbett (2009) and Holtskog (2013) reveal that the successful institutionalisation of CI is closely linked to contributions made by individual employees. This contribution is not only dependent on one’s interest in participating, but is also determined by one’s personal abilities with regard to CI (e.g. Lok et al., 2005; Lam et al., 2015). While different terms can be found in relation to this phenomenon (e.g. “empowerment or engagement”; Rother, 2010, p. 176), we use the term “CI empowerment” as we adopt the concept of structural empowerment as the underlying theory (Kanter, 1993).  CI empowerment covers the acquisition of required knowledge to undertake CI activities, as well as understanding of the CI goal to realise the impact of CI in one’s daily work (Lillrank et al., 2001). In addition, empowered employees feel supported by their management and colleagues to use their problem-solving skills actively, by openly talking about improvement opportunities and possible difficulties (Holtskog, 2013).