Introduction Management determines the success or failure of an organization. There are so many tasks, occurrences, issues and emergencies that take place in an organization in any given time and working alone becomes no longer viable. The concept of empowerment and delegation in any organization is important in ensuring that all the tasks are done perfectly within a given time frame with a common goal of achieving the core objectives of an organization. This paper will discuss the importance of delegation particularly in health care systems, the relationship between delegation and empowerment as well as the potential dangers of delegation and how it impacts on empowerment. Delegation in healthcare Delegation is a management concept that entails assigning specific duties to other people in an organization though the tasks may or may not be part of their job description. Stone (2004) describes delegation as “giving an employee the responsibility for part of your job and the authority to carry it out, while retaining control and accountability” (Stone, 2004, p. 1). Empowerment, on the other hand, means the applied effort by any management to improve the potential, skills and ability of the employees to best do their assigned duties with the aim of improving the performance of an organization. Delegation in health care set up is very important and is believed to have great benefits: “when delegation is undertaken effectively it allows qualified professionals to shift their focus from routine tasks to more complex tasks” (Royal College of Nursing, 2011, p. 1). However, it is worth noting that delegation in a health care set up is a very sensitive issue owing to the fact that the profession has an impact on the health status of people. A report by NASN (2011) defined nursing delegation as “transferring the responsibility of performing a nursing activity to another person while retaining accountability for the outcome” (NASN, 2011, p. 1). Relationship between delegation and empowerment Delegations and empowerment are concepts which work hand in hand. Effective delegation is only possible when there is empowerment of the people to whom duties are delegated to. Empowerment focuses on investing in the employee in terms of improving their ability to perform their assigned duties. Algase (2011) claimed that “empowerment takes employees interests as the means to achieve the end”(Algase, 2011, p. 1). Delegation may be taken as one form of empowerment whereby new authority is assigned together with the responsibilities and benefits that come with a task. On the other hand, empowerment cannot be effective without delegation. Delegation assigns specific tasks or responsibilities and then empowerment ensures that the person is well equipped for the responsibility. Delegation gives room for specialization whereby responsibilities are delegated to experts of that special field. This can be seen as a form of empowerment since specialization results to better performance. Importance of delegation Delegation distributes work load to other people and thus results can be achieved with much ease. Delegation can be viewed as teamwork whereby different tasks are assigned to different individuals. Delegation comes in handy during the times of emergencies when certain tasks may b