The Impact of Employee Empowerment on Productivity in the Ministry of Interior of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The Ministry of Interior in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is one of the largest organisations in the country. This sensitive ministry's primary mission is to maintain national security, and to ensure the safety and well-being of citizens. This ministry has a number of sectors and departments. It provides its services to more than 34 million people. As it mostly offers intangible products which are mostly services as is the case in most service sectors. It is important to maintain the quality of services and to study the reasons that can affect the productivity levels of its employees. Empowering employees is a relatively recent management concept. In the current literature, empowerment is one of the most influential administrative practices in the current era. The research gap lies in the fact that by reviewing recent literature, most of the studies on the impact of employee empowerment in Saudi Arabian organisations focused on empowering women only, while studies on the impact of employee empowerment on their productivity were minimal. This research is organised to explore the impact posed by employee empowerment on the level of their productivity in Ministry of Interior based in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The research has utilised secondary and primary data based on qualitative and quantitative research wherein the data gathered using questionnaire. The findings of this research revealed that there are multiple factors that are able to increase the employee productivity such as employee autonomy, their competence development and their knowledge of job-roles. However, employee productivity is found to be negatively related with their high involvement within the organisation might be because of distractions and imposing own decisions without considering management’s decisions or taking their consent for the work processes. It is further analysed that the research has a limitation in terms of the applied quantitative survey method because the inclusion of the large research sample for the survey process raises the chances of data redundancy which reduce the reliability of the findings in this research project. Hence, the future study is suggested to be organised with the aid of semi-structured interview method. It is recommended that the managers in the MOI of the KSA can focus on increasing employee empowerment and their productivity level as it decreases the issues such as ambiguities regarding job-roles, lack of competence and lack of autonomy which ultimately result into high employee productivity.