Employee empowerment practices and performance of commercial banks in Kenya

Abstract

Employee empowerment is a philosophy associated with real benefits for an organization. The banking sector is Human Capital Intensive since it relies heavily on its employees to offer services to its clients. Employee empowerment is a crucial Human Resource Management practice since it leads to the organization’s competitiveness, success, uniqueness and most importantly its growth. One of the ways to achieve this is by empowering employees. The objective of the study was to establish the relationship between employee empowerment practices and performance of commercial banks in Kenya. The research adopted a descriptive cross-sectional survey. The research targeted all the 43 Commercial Banks licensed to operate in Kenya. Primary data was used and was collected using a semi-structured questionnaire. The questionnaire was administered through the drop and pick later procedure and the respondents were human resource managers or anybody else in charge of the HR function. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics namely, frequencies, percentages, mean scores and standard deviations. The findings were that there are empowerment policies in all commercial banks in Kenya and these policies enable the employees in their individual career planning and developments. There was a positive correlation between employee empowerment practices and organizational performance. The study concluded that the employees of the commercial banks are made aware of their responsibilities, trained, and empowered with management roles such as participation in policy making and the freedom to make decisions within their jurisdiction. It also concluded that the banks encourage high productivity and innovativeness from the employees. The study recommends that empowerment practices be embraced whereby management can actively involve the employees in roles that will develop their skills and also adopt employee performance evaluation strategies. The study also recommends that banks should occasionally conduct customer satisfaction surveys so as to establish how best they can serve their clients and also conduct employee satisfaction surveys so as to establish ways in which the banks can provide the best working conditions for their employees to improve their productivity and that of the bank