The empowerment of service workers: Conceptualization and impacts across cultures

Customers often seek control to alter the service and choices for higher satisfaction (Bateson 1985b; Hui and Bateson 1991). Frontline employees on one hand are hired to serve and entertain customers, they have to observe organization regulations on the other hand. When complying with a customer's special request implies violation to the corporate policy, the frontline service employee will be caught in the middle. Empowerment strategy was commonly believed to be a panacea to role stress of frontline employees and a means to satisfy customer's special demands in service industry. However, empowerment remains a tantalizing notion to marketing practitioners and researchers. Managers were puzzled about the real meaning of empowerment and uncertain of how to empower their subordinates (Tjosvold, Hui, and Law 1998). Academics operationalized the empowerment construct in different ways and inconsistent findings on its impacts were yielded (Hui, Au, and Fock 2004).;The growth of international trade fuels the prosperity of services export, and at the same time, brings new challenges to managers in multinational service firms. Empowering employees of different cultures in overseas operations is more complicated.;The objectives of this thesis are three-fold: (a) to discern the meaning and dimensionality of the empowerment construct; (b) to investigate the influences of each empowerment facet on service employees and their subsequent impacts on customer satisfaction; and (c) to compare and evaluate the impacts of different empowerment facets on employees across cultures.;Instead of being a unidimensional construct as conceptualized in past studies, an extensive review of literature unveiled that empowerment should be a three-facet construct: (a) discretion empowerment---employee's perceived discretionary power by policy or acts of supervisor; (b) psychological empowerment---employee's perceived intrinsic motivation at work; and (c) relational empowerment---the employee's perceived strength and closeness of social relationship with supervisor. Empirical data from two surveys to service employees in telecommunications and bank industries confirmed and validated the hypothesized three-factor empowerment structure.;Another two sets of matched samples of hotel employees in the PRC and Canada were used to test the hypotheses about the inter-relationships of the three empowerment facets and their impacts on employees and customers across high power distance and low power distance cultures. Findings revealed three corridors of Empowerment influence: a direct path from discretion empowerment to job satisfaction and customer satisfaction; and two mediated paths via the psychological empowerment and relational empowerment. Cross-cultural analyses at national level and individual level found that the discretion empowerment effects on psychological empowerment and job satisfaction were mitigated by power distance while influences of relational empowerment were heightened by high power distance. Discretion empowerment and psychological empowerment were proved to be more effective to low-power distance employees. Relational empowerment was abounded to be more suitable for high-power distance employees.;This study contributed to the marketing theories in three aspects: (a) clarified the meaning and dimensionality of empowerment; (b) depicted the direct and mediation effects of empowerment on employee job satisfaction and customer satisfaction; and (c) explained the variation of empowerment impacts across cultures.