To meet our objectives, we asked officials at five agencies to identify initiatives they had that empowered or involved employees. From the inventories of the initiatives they developed in response to our request, we asked agency officials to identify those agency components and initiatives that, in their view, had successfully involved and empowered employees. We sought to identify practices that were commonly implemented by the agencies within the past 5 years. In some cases, agencies focused our attention on practices that began earlier.

We interviewed agency executives, managers, supervisors, front-line employees, and union representatives to discuss how agencies had implemented these practices to empower and involve employees, and we analyzed related documents and information they provided. We did not attempt to verify the performance data that agencies provided.

We included FAA in our review because it has certain exemptions from the Federal Acquisition Regulations designed to facilitate delegating procurement authorities to lower levels. We included IRS and OPM in our review, given IRS' exemption from certain title 5 personnel provisions and OPM's human capital leadership role in the federal government. FEMA and VBA were selected because a literature review of relevant articles indicated that front-line employees from those agencies had been empowered or involved in key agency decisions or operations.

Because we were seeking to review initiatives that had successfully empowered and involved employees, we asked headquarters officials to identify organizational components for our review. Our FAA work was concentrated at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in...