Teachers’ Personal and Team Empowerment and Their Relations to Organizational Outcomes: Contradictory or Compatible Constructs?

To date most models of empowerment have focused on teachers’ personal empowerment, which is defined as intrinsic task motivation reflecting an employee’s orientation to his or her work role. Interestingly, little scholarly attention has been turned to the interaction of empowerment and work-team membership, that is, to empowerment acquired from work in an empowered team. The study reported here juxtaposed these two forms of empowerment—personal and team—in an integrated model of organizational outputs (performance, organizational commitment, and professional commitment). The results from a sample of 983 teachers at 25 middle schools and 27 high schools indicated that teachers’ performance benefited most from the joint effect of high personal empowerment and team empowerment. Organizational commitment gained from high personal empowerment and team empowerment, as well as from low/high interaction; and professional commitment benefited most from high personal empowerment/low team empowerment or low personal empowerment/high team empowerment.