The Study of the Relationship between Employees’ Empowerment and Organizational Agility: A Case Study in Azarab Industrial Company

Abstract

With the advent of a new era of business which brings about changes as a need and main character, agile manufacturing system as an advanced production systems or production Paradigm guarantees the success and continuity of production systems. On the other hand, empowering employees makes the organizations show faster and more convenient responses in the competitive environment. This study was done with the aim to investigate the relationship between employees’ empowerment and organizational agility in Azarab Industries Company. This study is functional in terms of its objective and it is descriptive – analytical in terms of its method. The managers, professionals and industry personnel of Azarab were the statistical population of the study and 329 persons were chosen as the samples by using simple random sampling method. In order to measure organizational agility Espaydezer standard questionnaire (2007) in the book "Improving performance measurement" was used, and to measure the empowerment capacity, standard questionnaire of the empowerment based on four-factor model (Melhem, 2004) was based. Descriptive statistics (frequency distribution tables, frequency percentage) and inferential statistics (the Kolmogorov - Smirnov test to study the normality of the variables, Pearson correlation coefficient, and multiple regression analysis tests) were used to analyze data. The results indicated that the organization was relatively agile but, the empowerment of employees of AzarAb Industries Company was lower than the average. Pearson correlation test results showed there was a significant relationship between employees’ empowerment of AzarAb Industries Company and organizational agility. And the results of regression analysis test confirmed that the components of "knowledge", "trust", "motivation", and "communication" had in order the greatest impact on organizational agility.