The Negative Consequences of Empowering Consumers and Employees

Gone are the days of managers acting as sole decision-makers in strategic choices. Increasingly, managers “outsource” some decisions – from creating advertisements to deciding on mission statements – to both internal and external stakeholders: employees and customers. While delegation of agency is often a strategic move to dodge responsibility for potential missteps or avoid being perceived as lacking transparency (Bowen and Lawler, 1992), collecting information through shared decision-making also allows companies to induce positive effects by empowering those who participate. In workplace settings, for instance, empowering employees leads to increases in job satisfaction and performance (Kirkman, 1999; Spreitzer, 1995). Similarly, research on consumer empowerment – such as allowing consumers to personalize products and services – points to the benefits of involving consumers (Fuchs, Prandelli, and Schreier, 2010; Prahhalad and Ramaswamy, 2004; Wind and Rangaswamy, 2001). In contrast, we explore the possible negative consequences of such empowerment, examining how opening the Pandora’s box of empowerment can prove problematic when companies wish to close the lid and revert to making their own consequential decisions. Our research focuses the consequences of empowering stakeholders to vote, with three goals, each of which contributes to a broader understanding of the negative consequences of empowerment over time. First, we explore whether allowing people to vote leads them to want to continue voting on subsequent decisions, even when the “vote giver” may no longer desire such input. Indeed, research in political science shows that political participation (including voting) engenders future participation (Finkel, 1978; Putnam, 2000). As in the previous literature, we expected stakeholders to be satisfied when empowered; in addition, however, we expected empowerment to lead to stakeholders’ demand to continue voting. Second, we examine whether stakeholders who are allowed to vote on one issue and then have the vote taken away for a second issue are more upset than those who are not allowed to vote on the first issue and then given the vote for the second: while in each case stakeholders will have voted once, we suggest that having the vote taken away is so aversive that stakeholders are as dissatisfied as they are with never being allowed to vote at all. Finally, we explore whether all voting is good voting. In particular, we explore issues of voting on trivial issues.