Abstract: With speeding of world economy integration, it is increasingly important for organizations empowering the employee to obtain the competitive demand advantages for lower cost, higher performance, and more flexibility. The employee empowerment had been receiving more and more attention from scholars and practitioners, and had become one of the most important topics in management studies in the Western. On the basis of understanding foreign literatures in the recent 20 years, the studies of the employee empowerment, such as the backgrounds, conception, theory models, and three research paradigms on the employee empowerment in workplaces, were summarized. Furthermore, the future research direction in this area is put forward.

Key words: empowerment, social-structural empowerment, psychological empowerment, critical empowerment, research paradigm