HUMAN CAPITAL DYNAMICS IN INDIAN POWER UTILITIES: LINKING CULTURE, EMPOWERMENT, ENGAGEMENT, AND SATISFACTION

Abstract

Purpose: This study considers organizational culture, psychological empowerment, employee engagement, and job satisfaction jointly among clerical and ground-level employees in selected West Bengal power utilities. Instead of approaching these constructs as separate HR indicators, it documents their pairwise interrelationships within a single employee sample. Design/methodology/approach: A cross-sectional self-report survey of 250 employees from CESC (n = 116), WBSEDCL (n = 104), and DVC (n = 30) was analysed. Organizational culture was measured using OCTAPACE (40 items), psychological empowerment with Spreitzer’s 16-item scale, employee engagement with UWES-17, and job satisfaction with the 20-item Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire. The analyses included descriptive statistics, Cronbach’s alpha estimates, selected exploratory group comparisons, exploratory factor-analytic summaries, and two tailed Pearson correlations. Findings: All six correlations in the integrated four-driver matrix were positive and statistically significant, ranging from r = .169 to .393. The strongest observed association was between job satisfaction and psychological empowerment (r = .393, p < .001), followed by psychological empowerment and employee engagement (r = .362, p < .001). The weakest was between psychological empowerment and organizational culture (r = .169, p = .007). Mean scores were 118.05 (SD = 11.72) for organizational culture, 64.83 (SD = 6.76) for psychological empowerment, 3.74 (SD = .53) for employee engagement per item, and 75.65 (SD = 9.29) for general job satisfaction. Research limitations/implications: The cross-sectional, self-report design, localized employee segment, unequal organization subsamples, and bivariate analysis rule out causal inference and integrated model testing. Practical implications: HR leaders may adopt a portfolio-oriented diagnostic approach that monitors culture, empowerment, engagement, and satisfaction together, while remaining attentive to variation across subgroups. Originality/value: The study provides a bounded, integrated correlation map of four HR drivers in a West Bengal power-utility workforce, rather than a causal or performance-prediction model.