How to empower current employees to assume leadership responsibilities in their roles in the retail industry.

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to identify how to empower current employees to assume leadership responsibilities in their roles in the retail industry. Organizations can maximize productivity and efficiency, shape a positive culture and promote harmony in order to achieve organizational goals. Currently in Thailand, there are less organizations promote employees to be a leader. Therefore, in order to empower them to assume leadership; organizations need to support them in many ways. The theory of leadership development and several other potential factors were extracted from literatures and adopted as the assumptions for the study. Primary data was collected qualitatively, using open-ended interview questions divided into two focus groups. Nine interviewees were selected from a retail organization, which they work in both catering and sales departments. The findings reaffirmed most of the assumptions from the research’s framework, as well as introducing several factors. Consequently, it yielded the recommendations of potential methods of how to empower current employees to assume leadership responsibilities in the retail industry and to support them. The limitations and contributions were also discussed in the paper.