The idea of empowering employees so that they may be more effective and efficient, form a stronger bond of commitment to the organisation, or take a greater level of responsibility for quality assurance is a recurrent theme. The relevant literature presents no consistently used definition of empowerment and some writers do not provide a definition, preferring instead to use the term in a 'taken for granted' way. The term empowerment is used in a broad range of management approaches and discussions of the employment relationship; this ubiquitous nature has rendered the understanding of empowerment unclear. This paper will provide clarity to the understanding of empowerment by outlining some of the ways that empowerment has been discussed and from those discussions develop a typology of empowerment.