Implementing and Sustaining Empowerment: Lessons Learned from Comparison of a For-Profit and a Nonprofit Organization

This article explores the experiences of two organizations, one nonprofit and the other forprofit, seeking to create a culture of empowerment. Both organizations make a strong start and achieve significant change that is reflected in qualitative observations, quantitative measures of empowerment, and organizational performance results. The for-profit organization manages to sustain ongoing change in the direction of greater empowerment; however, the nonprofit loses focus and eventually drops the change effort. The article compares the two cases paying particular attention to contextual factors to better understand what may have lead to the different outcomes and then closes with ten lessons for sustaining empowerment efforts.