Empowered employees are able to make more decisions on their own, but there's a possibility of the employees taking advantage of the empowerment for personal gain. This also means employees may become less responsible or efficient based on decisions they've made. For example, an employee may take to spending more time on non-work-related activities such as long breaks or employee committee meetings as a result of his empowerment.
Implementing employee empowerment may bring about misunderstanding between managers and employees. In an organizational culture with a rigid hierarchy, managers may have a difficult time accepting a new culture of employee empowerment. These conflicts can result to an environment in which the management and employees can't have productive working relations. While empowerment may provide subordinate employees with job satisfaction, it might deprive managers of the same job satisfaction.
Empowerment of employees may require a training program to educate employees about leadership skills, assertiveness and group dynamics. Even though this training may be beneficial, extra costs and time have to be incurred by the business to make it happen. Additionally, no training program can guarantee that employee empowerment will yield positive results.
While the capacity to make more decisions is laudable, it can also have negative effects. Employees who don't have sufficient knowledge about various business decisions can undermine the company's success or cause interrelation conflicts. Insufficient knowledge may be as a result of lack of training or a simply that an employee isn't competent at a task he's been assigned. For example, a team leader in charge of sales who feels the need to contribute to how the IT department operates may make poor decisions in that arena. This sales team leader may also conflict with the IT department employees.