The Effects of Empowerment and Cultural Orientation on High Growth Firms: A Field Experiment in Augmenting Managerial Capacity

Fast growth in firms occurs when managers are able to adapt managerial capacity to cope with increasing workloads. The literature identifies numerous ways in which this can be accomplished, but empowering employees and creating a culture oriented toward rapid growth are two such effective mechanisms. The theories of empowerment and person-to-organization fit will be used to ground our research model. The method adopted for the study was a field experiment in the self-storage industry. Transactional data was gathered over a year and a half from branches of a fast-growing firm. The empowerment and cultural re-orientation manipulations were instrumented through privileging some employees with use of a revenue management system and extensive training of employees in the firm’s growth values. The resulting dataset will be analyzed through Partial Least Squares to determine if cultural orientation and empowerment makes a difference in increasing the rate of revenue and occupancy increases. We suppose this study should provide directions for researchers and implications for how entrepreneurs should train employees in the firm’s cultural alignment and empowerment. The study has theoretical ramifications in showing that empowerment theory can very possibly be extended to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).