FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — A University of Arkansas researcher has demonstrated that job interventions designed to increase employee control and improve job satisfaction are successful only in combination with a high level of social support from supervisors.

Daniel Ganster, professor of management at the Sam M. Walton College of Business, and Mary Logan, professor of industrial relations at the London School of Economics, spent one year gathering data from project managers of a large U.S. trucking company and developed a managerial-intervention plan to empower the managers in their execution of large projects.

The researchers found that after only four months, the empowerment intervention increased perceptions of control and improved job satisfaction among project managers, but it did so only for those managers who had supportive supervisors. Without supervisory support, the intervention had no effect. Ganster and Logan, a former graduate student of Ganster, found that the intervention, when accompanied by support from supervisors, improved the overall job performance of the managers’ units, even though it did not improve stress-related outcomes such as depression and anxiety.

“We found the intervention worked, but it was highly dependent on the relationship the project managers had with their supervisors,” Ganster said. “If their supervisors were highly supportive, then the intervention really took -- we increased perceptions of control and produced some positive outcomes. But if a manager did not have a supportive supervisor, the intervention did not work at all.”

Management researchers believe that empowerment, a more contemporary term for employee control, influences work-related stress, which has a significant impact on an employee’s physical and mental well-being. Business-management researchers define empowerment as a group of practices or polices that leads to increases in employee decision-making power. In short, companies empower employees when they implement practices that distribute control, information, knowledge and rewards. For the past 20 years, many companies have deployed human resource models that include employee empowerment as a tool to create more effective and competitive organizations.

Few studies, however, have rigorously tested the general belief that empowerment has a positive influence on job satisfaction, stress-related outcomes, and individual and unit performance. Most researchers have simply measured the relationship of these factors within organizations without actively experimenting with them and measuring the results against those of a control group. Ganster and Logan’s research is innovative in that they introduced an intervention to discover whether carefully planned changes produce happier employees, improve performance and increase efficiency.

The researchers targeted the trucking project managers because the researchers knew that group experienced tremendous stress on the job. Each project manager is in charge of all aspects of a large contract, including hiring drivers, truck and equipment maintenance, customer relations and accounting.

“It’s a big job, and these managers are under lot of stress,” Ganster said. “The contracts they’re in charge of are severe. They have very high quality-control standards, and the on-time percentage is typically set a 98 percent, so they’re operating with very little margin of error.” 

After talking to project managers for a year, the researchers identified two areas in which managers said they had little control. The managers wanted more decision-making power with routine and emergency maintenance of tractors. They said they often had to send disabled tractors to company-owned maintenance shops that were sometimes hundreds of miles from the project’s office. Secondly, the managers wanted more control of the company’s accounting system, which sometimes assessed charges incorrectly or inaccurately to their projects. The managers said they wanted power not only to monitor but also to correct mistakes and keep better track of expenses. The lack of control in both of these areas significantly affected their ability to fulfill contracts on time and on budget, Ganster said.

Based on these two areas, Ganster and Logan designed an intervention that gave the managers decision-making power with tractor maintenance and greater access to the accounting system. Part of the latter focus included software training to help the managers navigate the accounting system. Regarding maintenance, the managers reduced costs by sending tractors to local vendors instead of to the company-owned shops miles away. They also received training on basic maintenance.

“So when tractors came into their yards, the managers could go and inspect tires or brakes themselves,” Ganster said, “and this saved a lot of time and money. Having the wherewithal to do minor maintenance, inspections and so forth, gave them a feeling of control over what kind of shape their equipment was in and general outcomes.”

The managers also complained about poor response when tractors would break down at odd hours. Ganster and Logan established a protocol to provide better assistance when tractors became disabled and stranded.

Ganster said the intervention worked, but success depended on other variables. The researchers saw important, positive changes in managers’ attitudes and unit performance for those projects in which supervisors supported changes. For example, although short-term maintenance costs increased due to scheduled, preventive maintenance, the overall maintenance costs decreased even more because there were fewer breakdowns and emergencies. Most importantly, though, the researchers discovered that interventions, no matter how well-planned and executed, were not successful without pervasive support.

“We learned that control, in a meaningful way, is not so easy to change on the job,” Ganster said. “You can do careful pre-work, diagnose the situation carefully, figure out which kind of control intervention is needed, design an intervention and implement it carefully, but if the supervisors are not supportive of the ones whose empowerment has been changed, then it’s not going to work. So the lesson was if you’re going to work on these relationships, you have to get the next, higher level of management involved and convince them of the importance of being supportive.”