Dimensions and patterns in employee empowerment :  assessing what matters to street-level bureaucrats 

 -  2002 
<br/><br/> Empowerment of public employees has been touted as an important medianting step in improving public organizational out-comes, yet such a relationship depends on an assumption that employees value what is offered as empowerment. This qualitative study explored the assumption through in-delpth interviews of stret-level bureaucrats in a large state human service agency. The interviews support previous research that empowerment is multidimensional; five patterns in empowerment were found. Empowerment programs must consider what each individual employee values