Relationship Between Meritocracy Perceived by Managers and Personnel Cognitive Empowerment

The main purpose of this paper was to evaluate the relationship between meritocracy as perceived by managers and personnel cognitive empowerment. To reach this end, all managerial and non-managerial staff of the Iranian Police Dept. in Kurdistan Province were selected as the subjects of the study. The research method was descriptive-correlational and the study was considered to be an applied research. Accordingly, it was an applied survey. In order to collect data to measure the basic concepts of the research, Peerce and Tsui’s Meritocracy Questionnaire (2006) and Spreitzer’s Personnel Cognitive Empowerment Questionnaire (2005), respectively including 21 and 16 questions, were used. Cronach’s alpha coefficients of 0.91 and 0.88 showed the Reliability of the two questionnaires. Content validity test, too, was applied to complete the standardization of the questionnaires. The final results of the research, based on SPSS software, show that there is significant relationship between meritocracy perceived by managers and employee empowerment. Besides, further conclusions show the same relationship between the dependent variable of empowerment and all dimensions of the independent variable, which are recruiting the merited, testing the merited, screening the merited, selecting the merited, appointing the merited, developing the merited and retaining the merited.