Empowered architects

In the course on project management and leadership for PhD students we are talking about the role of the project leader. The lecturer Max Rapp Ricciardi writes in an article by about empowerment and refers to an article by Quinn & Spreitzer.

Anyway, he mentions four characteristics of empowered people:

• They feel they are masters of their own destiny (they can do the work without management interference)
• The understand the totality of the business they are operating in
• They have confidence and a feeling of doing a good job
• They are convinced they can influence others, which is the opposite of learned helplessness

If you are to be an efficient architect I think you need to have all of these four characteristics, or in short you need to be empowered!
An architect which works in an organisation where he or she is not empowered have probably little chance of doing a successful job. I would even go so far to ask why such an organisation would even bother with having such a role?