Congrats Dr Rozana! You’re invited to publish on LinkedIn

On 20 June 2014, I received the above message from LinkedIn and felt very privileged and honoured. But, I was wondering since then, what can I write that would be interesting and useful for readers? I do not want to write for just the sake of writing. It must be interesting, useful and worthwhile for readers to take their time out of their busy lives, to spare a few minutes to read my articles.

Content was not a problem. Twenty years of lecturing, researching, writing, coaching and delivering workshops have led me to own a treasure trove of notes and slide presentations that I would love to share with like-minded people.

So, I am taking my first step to publish on LinkedIn. Before that, I would like to thank LinkedIn for the invitation to write.

These are my areas of teaching, research and interest: Organisational Behaviour, Leadership, Strategic Human Resource Management, Managing Change, Total Quality Management (TQM), Employee Empowerment, and will attempt to write with regards to these areas.

Currently, I am coaching and writing on employee empowerment – so I may start with this subject.

You might say ‘Oh no! Not employee empowerment, that terrible confusing management jargon with does not deliver results!’ I would not blame you for thinking in this way. But, please do not be put off, bear with me and read on. When I started my research I felt the same. The term was confusing and not only that, there were significant criticisms surrounding it, and organisations were blamed for paying ‘lip service’ to empowering their employees. I immediately identified three problems with regards to employee empowerment:

• · There was confusion with other management initiatives
• · There was problem in implementation and
• · There was a lack of research

These criticisms about this subject did not make my life easy during literature review. However, I persuaded and the subject of employee empowerment became immensely interesting.

Within the historical context, several authors report that employee empowerment came to prominence in the 1980s as a response to rapid economic and technological change and it has also been widely associated with initiatives such as TQM (Total Quality Management) – that immediately made this subject ‘employee empowerment’ attractive to me, because one of my favourite areas of study was TQM. And so, it was settled my PhD research would be employee empowerment.

© Copyright Dr Rozana Ahmad Huq.  October, 2014.

More about employee empowerment in the next Huq post …. Thank you.