Employees, supervisors, and empowerment in the public sector: The role of employee trust

The purpose of this research was to examine the relationship between employee trust in the supervisor and a sense of empowerment.;Attempts at empowerment in the public sector have had mixed results, but the objectives of empowerment are sufficiently important to seek factors which might improve the success of its implementation in the public sector. It is hypothesized that trust is positively associated to the employee's perception of empowerment and that employees who perceive that they have a high level of trust in the supervisor will have a higher sense of empowerment than employees who have a low level of trust in the supervisor will have.;Empowerment has four elements: meaning (the value of the work), competence (ability to perform the task), self-determination (ability to initiate and regulate actions), and impact (ability to influence or determine organizational outcomes).;In spite of an interest in the concept of trust, there is no contemporary measure for trust within the supervisor-employee relationship. Both procedural justice (the perceived fairness of procedures and decisions for compensation, evaluation, rewards, and dispute resolution) and interactional justice (the perceptions that a supervisor implements the rules fairly and treats the employee with respect and honesty) may create higher levels of trust. The constructs of procedural justice and interactional justice are used as surrogates to operational trust. It is hypothesized that both procedural justice and interactional justice are positively associated to the employee's perception of empowerment.;The analysis of the responses in the study shows that there is a link between employee trust in supervisors and employee perceptions of empowerment and that employee trust in the supervisor has a strong relationship with a sense of empowerment. The results demonstrate that as an organization attempts to implement employee empowerment it needs to pay attention to the level of employee trust in the supervisor as a means to improve implementation success.