(Joey): Max.

7 mins
Good evening everyone, today we are going to talk about employee empowerment. I will first
introduce the background knowledge, laying a foundation for the two articles discussed by Jenny
and Muriel respectively, followed by Jayesh talking about what each article means to us.
✤ Background Knowledge
• First proposed:
- The concept of employee empowerment first appeared in the management literature in
1977 by Kanter.
• What is empowerment
- Empowerment is a set of structures, policies, and practices designed to decentralize power
and authority throughout the organization, enabling employees at lower level to act
appropriately.
• Early definition: empowerment is delegating decision-making autonomy to
employees over job activities.
• Current understanding: more recent research recognizes that empowerment is not
simply delegation — sharing authority and resources with subordinates does not
empower them automatically, additional conditions need to be created to enable
employees to use the delegated authority and resources effectively,
For example: suppose a hotel front-desk clerk is delegated to respond to
guest’s complaints but without sufficient information, knowledge and other
support, the clerk does not believe that she or he can complete the tasks, then
this is not a true empowerment.
Such insights give rise to the debate over the effectiveness of empowerment
• Debate over the effectiveness of empowerment
- Proponents:
• Employee empowerment is an effective management practice for improving
positive attitudes and desirable work outcomes.
- Critical thinkers:
• More and more research suggests inconsistent results of empowerment, doubting
the effectiveness of empowerment.
- Possible reasons for doubting the effectiveness:
• First: extant research seldom considers the combined effects of social-structural
empowerment and psychological empowerment, which might lead to inaccurate
results in empowerment effectiveness.
• Second: there are insufficient researches on the contextual boundary conditions
of empowerment. It means that empowerment is not suitable for all situations, it
will only have positive impacts if the contextual factors enhance empowerment,
otherwise, it can have negative impacts if you go over the boundaries.
 Contextual factors: for example, organizational characteristics influence the
effectiveness of empowerment, such as organizational culture, management
style and practices, leadership styles.
You may wonder what does it mean by “social-structural empowerment and psychological
empowerment”, which I have just mentioned. They are two perspectives of employee
empowerment.
• Two perspectives and three levels of empowerment
- The two perspectives complement each other to form a complete theory of empowerment.
There is a greater utility in integrating both perspectives than in using them independently
to review the effectiveness of empowerment.
• Social-structural empowerment:
✓ Macro orientation, focusing on organizational level: highlights the
transition of authority and responsibility from upper management to frontline
staff.
✓ Related to job characteristic theory: it highlights the importance of the main
job characteristics in prompting favorable personal and work outcomes. It
means improving employee motivation through structural empowerment by
effective job design —— practices associated with structural empowerment
such as redesigning work tasks, enriching work contents and elevating
authority to employees reinforce core job characteristics and affect work-
related outcomes.
✓ Measured by empowerment climate: a shared perception regarding the extent
to which an organization makes use of structures, polices, and practices
supporting employee empowerment. If employees hold a shared perception
that the organization has a climate of supporting empowerment, it means there
is an effective structural empowerment.
✓ Three organizational practices associated with empowerment climate:
1. Information sharing: organizations provide sensitive information
about costs, productivity quality and financial performance to
employees.
2. Autonomy through boundaries: organizational structures,
policies and practices that encourage initiative action, including
developing a clear vision and clarifying related purpose, work
procedures and responsibilities.
3. Team accountability: teams are the center of decision-making
authority and performance accountabilities in organizations, and
teams are supported by individual and group training and selection
decisions.
• Psychological empowerment:
✓ Micro orientation, focusing on departmental level & individual level:
psychological empowerment is an individual’s positive orientation to his or
her work role, which highlights employees’ personal beliefs about their roles
related to the organization.
 ✓ Explained by Self-efficacy theory: suggests that the psychological state of
self-efficacy plays a role in how goals and tasks are approached. Individuals
with high self-efficacy tend to pay more efforts. Based on this theory,
psychological empowerment is considered to be the intrinsic motivation that
drive to perform effectively.
Self-efficacy: the extent of one's belief in one's own ability to
complete tasks and reach goals.
✓ Four cognition dimensions of psychological empowerment, similar for both
individual and department (teams):
1. Meaningfulness: occurs when one’s job tasks fit the personal
values, beliefs and behaviors, making sense for him or her.
2. Competence: reflects the belief that one possesses the ability to
carry out a task.
3. Self-determination: a feeling of autonomy or sense of choice
when initiating work actions that an individual undertakes.
4. Impact: the amount of influence an individual has on work
outcomes.
✓ Although psychological empowerment shares similar meanings at individual
and department level, the focus is distinct at these two levels:
Individual level: focus on individuals’ perception regarding how one
is personally empowerment.
Department level: focus on the shared perceptions among team
members regarding a team’s collective level of empowerment.

- Therefore:
• Employees form complementary ad coexisting perceptions concerting
empowerment experience at all levels. A social-structural perspective is
incomplete because empowering practices have little effect on employees when
they lack fo self-efficacy; similarly, it is difficult for employees’ perceived
psychological empowerment to work without consideration of organizational or
work-unit empowerment practices.
If employee empowerment is effective, it is believed to be useful in various aspects.
• Significances of effective employee empowerment:
- Stronger relationship with positive attitudes:
 • Job satisfaction: employees are more likely to have a pleasurable or positive
emotional state with their job.
• Self-efficacy enhancement: it promotes employees’ self-efficacy as empowering
employees has a motivational impact on work outcomes since they tend to perceive
that they are entrusted with genuine responsibility for work process and outcomes.
• Management trustworthiness enhancement: it promotes employees’ trust in their
management as empowered employees tend to perceive empowerment as signaling
management’s willingness to nurture their career.
• Employee commitment enhancement: it promotes employees to devote
themselves to the organization.
- Can also positively impact performances:
• Structural efficiency enhancement: it enhances structural efficiency by removing
unnecessary organizational layers.
• Task performance: the effectiveness of someone carries out his or her tasks.
• Contextual performance: activities that contribute to the overall well-being of the
organization, for example, volunteering for additional work, following
organizational rules and procedures even when personally inconvenient, assisting
and cooperating with coworkers, and various other discretionary behaviors.
• Customer satisfaction
(Muriel): Max. 8 mins
Assessing the Effectiveness of Empowerment on Service Quality: A Multi-
level Study of Chinese Tourism Firms

(Lin, Wu & Ling, 2017)

Your Bibliography: Lin, M., Wu, X., & Ling, Q. (2017). Assessing the effectiveness of
empowerment on service quality: A multi-level study of Chinese tourism firms. Tourism
Management, 61, 411-425. doi: 10.1016/j.tourman.2017.03.001

The first article is called ‘Assessing the Effectiveness of Empowerment on Service Quality: A
Multi-level Study of Chinese Tourism Firms’. It is closely related to what Joey mentioned that there
are two perspectives of empowerment with three levels of empowerment, which should be
considered all together to measure the effectiveness of employee empowerment. This study is
designed:
✤ Purpose

• To rest the relationships among three levels of empowerment — organizational, departmental, and
individual — and simultaneously their cascading effects on frontline employees’ service quality.
✤ Background of the Article
• Importance of the topic:
- Employee empowerment is often mentioned as an effective motivational approach in the
industry, however, there is long-lasting debate on the merits/actual effectiveness of
empowerment.
• Current Research Gaps:
- Noticed that there might be greater utility in combining both social-structural
empowerment perspective and psychological empowerment perspective for evaluating the
effectiveness of empowerment, there is still a lack of empirical research that
systematically integrates the two perspectives (3 levels).
- Little empirical research addresses the organizational contextual boundary conditions of
psychological empowerment, little is known about in what kind of organizational
situation empowerment is suitable, meaning that there might be moderators in the context
can affect the effectiveness.
Contextual moderations: variables in the context like organizational
situations that can strengthen or limit the effect of empowerment.
To fill the research gaps, based on the aforementioned theories of the relationships among the three
levels of empowerment, the authors proposed 6 hypothesis in 3 types.
✤ Objectives and Hypothesis
• Objective 1: to systematically examine the main correlations among the three levels of
empowerment.
➡ Hypothesis 1a: Organizational empowerment climate correlates positively with frontline
employees’ psychological empowerment

• Organizational empowerment climate → Individual psychological

empowerment: organizational structures, policies, and practices that transfer
autonomy and responsibility to lower-level individuals help give rise to the feeling
of empowerment. For example:
Information sharing helps individuals understand the meaning of their work
better, develop a sense of competence when performing tasks, and makes
them feel better able to influence their organization.
Autonomy through boundaries helps employees define the boundaries within
which one can exercise autonomous actions and influences, which associates
with greater feelings of self-determination and impact.
➡ Hypothesis 1b: Organizational empowerment climate correlates positively with department
psychological empowerment.
• Organizational empowerment climate → Department psychological
empowerment: organizational structures, policies, and practices that transfer
autonomy and responsibility to lower-level individuals create preconditions for
department psychological empowerment.
When sensitive information on finances, operations, and performance are
shared with employees throughout departments, members in departments see
 their work as meaningful because they understand how department work
roles fit into the larger goals and strategies of the organization.
More information also allows employees to determine for the entire
department what actions to take, increasing feelings of meaning and
determination.
When departments have the authority to recruit, train, and set their own goals,
the degree of department members’ common perceived determination,
impact, and competence perceptions strengthen
➡ Hypothesis 2: Department psychological empowerment correlates positively with frontline
employees' psychological empowerment.
• Department psychological climate → Individual psychological empowerment:
team operations and process influence individual feelings of empowerment. It is
difficult to empower on individual to do his or her own tasks without empowering
other team members to do theirs.
Since affect transfers from one team member to another through modeling,
individual team members might be more motivated to carry out their own
tasks when other team members share passions to carry out theirs, and when
they believe team members perform well.
Team members might be more likely to perceive that they are performing
meaningful and important tasks when other team members feel similarly.
found a positive relationship between collective efficacy and self-efficacy.
• Objective 2: to further understand the relationships among three levels of empowerment by
testing the mediation effects of department psychological empowerment and employees’
psychological empowerment.
- Mediation effects: seeks to identify and explain the mechanism or process that underlies
an observed relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable via the
inclusion of a third hypothetical variable / a hypothesized causal chain in which one
variable affects a second variable that, in turn, affects a third variable.

➡ Hypothesis 3: Department psychological empowerment mediates the relationship between

organizational empowerment climate and frontline employees’ psychological
empowerment.
•
Department psychological empowerment mediate the relationship between
organizational empowerment climate and individual psychological
empowerment: scholars argue that in comparison to variables from distant levels,
variables are more likely to be influenced by variables from adjacent levels.
Supervisors offer feedback and instruments as part of their daily routines, and
therefore these practices influence employees’ behaviors more powerfully,
immediately, and proximally, with organization-level practices providing
distal effects. Therefore, in comparison to structural empowerment at the
organizational level, psychological empowerment at the department level
 might exert a more direct or immediate effect on individual psychological
empowerment. Only when middle managers understand and believe in the
philosophy and goals of organizational empowerment can they implement an
empowerment program throughout a department.
➡ Hypothesis 4: Employees' psychological empowerment mediates the relationship between
department psychological empowerment and frontline employee service quality.
• Individual psychological empowerment mediates the relationship between
department psychological empowerment and frontline employee service
quality: since individuals are those directly contribute to the service quality,
higher-level empowerment promotes individual psychological empowerment,
which in turn enhances employees’ service quality to customers, means that
individual-level psychological empowerment mediates the impacts of higher-level
empowerment on individual and organizational outcomes.
Empowering managerial practices have little effect on employees when they
lack self-efficacy, in such case, even if higher level delegate authorities to
employees, they will not able to make effective use of the authority for
service quality improvement.
• Objective 3: to test the moderation effects of organizational empowerment climate, department
psychological empowerment, SBE on the relationship between individual psychological
empowerment and service quality — investigating organizational situation and contextual factors
that moderate the empowerment effectiveness.
- Moderation effects: a way to check whether that third variable strengthen or weaken
the relationship between an independent and dependent variable.

➡ Hypothesis 5a: Organizational empowerment climate moderates the effect of individual

psychological empowerment on service quality such that the effect is stronger when there is
a positive empowerment climate.
• Organizational empowerment climate moderates of individual psychological
empowerment on service quality: organizational empowerment climate represents
an organizational design characteristic of an empowering system, providing a
facilitative environment for employees to work initiatively. Although individual
psychological empowerment leads to intrinsic motivation through promotion of
self-efficacy, it alone does not ensure performance because a comprehensive model
of work performance must include not only ability but also willingness and
opportunity.
In organizations with a high-level empowerment climate, employees have
access to lines of information, support, resources, and opportunity to learn
and grow, and thus have more capability to transfer resources to complete
 tasks. Therefore, enthusiasm and self-determination stimulated by a high
level of empowerment climate strengthens the positive effect of employee
psychological empowerment on service quality.
In contrast, in an organization with a low empowerment climate, the effect of
employees’ psychological empowerment on job performance is limited
because the employees lack the resources and opportunities to offer high-
quality service.
➡ Hypothesis 5b: Department psychological empowerment moderates the effect of individual
psychological empowerment on individual performance such that the effect is stronger
when there is positive department psychological empowerment.
• Department psychological empowerment moderates of individual
psychological empowerment on service quality: department psychological
empowerment also serves as resources and opportunities to guarantee the
effectiveness of individual psychological empowerment.
Team psychological empowerment is an effective way to promote team
processes; it decreases the difficulty or complexity of individual tasks on a
team. On empowered teams, individual tasks of each team member are
simplified due to increased supportive behaviors among team members and
improvements to team communication and cooperation. In line with this
perspective.
➡ Hypothesis 6: Organizational SBE moderates the effect of frontline employee
psychological empowerment and service quality such that the effect is stronger when there
is positive SBE.
• SBE moderates of individual psychological empowerment on service quality:
SBE service behavior-based evaluations is one aspect of a behavior-based control
system that involve evaluating employees based on how they behave or act rather
than on the measurable outcomes they achieve. It is a misunderstanding that
empowering employees means merely less control; it must generate more internal
self-control for each employee. Although scholars argue that organizational service
behavior-based evaluation (SBE) helps with execution of empowerment by guiding
and limiting employee actions, empirical evidence is lacking. There are two major
schools of thought about control.
The first views control equivalent to power and influence, and is
characterized by highly centralized, top-down command management and is
therefore incompatible with empowerment.
The second views control as performance-focused management to ensure
activities are oriented toward desired results. Management control is not
about power centralization or determining specific subordinate activities, but
rather establishing performance standards and collecting, review- ing, and
acting accordingly. Following the second thought, SBE in the present study is
a performance-control method, playing a complementary role on the effects
of empowerment.
Roels of SBE
 - Emphasize services: sending “behavioral signals to the employees about
the imperatives of the service setting”, which helps employees believe in
the importance of service work, and clarifies and guides employees’
service behaviors. In high-level SBE organizations, empowered
employees might try their best to display excellent, flexible, and novel
service to customers to adapt to service settings and be recognized by
their organizations (they know there are benefits and gains for
behaving well), and their internal motivation is triggered, and ultimately
their perceived psychological empowerment exerts greater effects on
work performance. In low-level SBE organizations, even empowered
employees are unwilling to offer valued services to customers because
they cannot gain benefits through excellent service.
- Reduce ambiguity: empowered employees may perceive that taking
more accountability and responsibility is risky, and thus might desire
more structure through task clarification, feedback, and guidance. SBE
helps employees understand and follow the organizational orientation in
long-run customer service, and therefore weakens negative effects of
empowerment to guarantee the effectiveness of empowerment. In low-
level SBE organizations, they might refuse to engage in creative
behaviors for fear that they will be punished if they make mistakes under
an outcome-orientated performance system.
✤ Methodology

• Sample and procedure:

- Sample: this study drew 1566 employee-supervisor pairs from 123 departments in 31
hotels, 21 travel agencies and 1 restaurant in 16 cities primarily in east and southeast of
China.
• The organizations were selected based on the availability of managers who could
assist with data collection.

1566 Employees 1566 Supervisors

Gender 63.2% female 50.7% female

Agen 62.1% in the age range 16-24 64.9% in the age range 25-34

74.6% had monthly salaries about 48.1% had monthly salaries about
Salary 801-2000RMB 2001-8000RMB
44.8% had a high school or secondary 50.7% had a high school or secondary
Education background vocational school education vocational school education

Tenure 61.8% were in the firms for 0.5-3 years 44.9% were in the firms for 0.5-3 years

- Survey handling:
•
HR managers assisted by delivering survey packets to more than 3 employees in
each frontline service department.
•
Employees rated perceptions of organizational empowerment climate, organization
SBE, department psychological empowerment, and individual psychological
empowerment.
 • Direct supervisors evaluated frontline employees’ service quality.
• All envelopes were kept anonymous, employee questionnaires were matched to
responses from supervisors based on identification number.
• Employees with a turner less than 6 months were removed.
• It means that there are some contextual moderations
• Measures
- All variables were measured using validated scales that have been used extensively in
organizational research, all variables were measured with a Likert-type scale ranging from
1(strongly disagree) to 7(strongly agree), and all the items in the scale are proved to be
with high internal reliability.
- Different levels of empowerment should be assessed using measures that align with their
substantive levels of analysis, therefore different Liker-type measurements are employed:
Level Objective Participant Measures Explanation and examples
• 3 dimensions: information-sharing,
autonomy through boundaries,
team responsibility.
Empowerment
Employees 21 items • E.g. Employees in my organization
climate
can receive the information needed
Organizational level to understand the performance of
the organization
• E.g. The organization evaluates
employees' performance according
Organizational SBE Employees 7 items to employees' ability to resolve
customer complaints
• F o u r d i m e n s i o n s : p o t e n c y,
a u t o n o m y, c o m p e t e n c e , a n d
Department meaningfulness.
Department level psychological Employees 20 items • E.g. Employees in my department
empowerment believe that the department can be
extremely good at producing high-
quality work.
• Four dimensions: meaningfulness,
Individual competence, self-determination,
Individual level psychological Employees 12 items and impact.
empowerment • E.g. I am confident about my
ability to do my job
• E.g. The employee is always
Service quality Supervisors 10 items providing reliable service to
customers.

- Control variables: employee demographics and group/organizational characteristics were

used as control variables to exclude potential influences on employee work performance.
• Analysis of Data
- Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM): this study employee a HLM technique to evaluate
the relationships among three levels:
•
Random coefficient models are used to analyze main effects at the same level
•
Intercepts-as-outcome models are used to analyze cross-level main effects
•
Slope-as-outcome are used to to examine cross-level moderation effects
Level Sample
Individual level Level 1 1566 employees
Department level Level 2 123 department
 Organization level Level 3 53 organizations

- before conducting HLM, the authors examined an evaluation of assumptions of normality

and multi-collinearity, the results suggested that the data did not violate the normality
assumption and multi-collinearity was not a problem since all tolerance values were above
the threshold of 0.1.
✤ Results (Main Findings)
• Measurement model analysis
- Neither alternative model fit the data as well as the baseline did. These results
demonstrated that the empowerment construct of three levels were distinct, and that the
measurements of these constructs were reliable and valid.

• Aggregation statistics
- Aggregation was permissible for these three level variables.
• Preliminary analysis: based on descriptive statistics, initially support hypotheses.
- r = 0.68, p < 0.01: organizational empowerment climate correlates positively with
department psychological empowerment (H1b initially supported)
- r = 0.51, p < 0.01: organizational empowerment climate correlates positively with
individual psychological empowerment (H1a initially supported)
- r = 0.64, p < 0.01: department psychological empowerment correlates positively with
employee psychological empowerment (H2 initially supported)
- r = 0.14, p < 0.01: department psychological empowerment correlates positively with
employee service quality
- r = 0.18, p < 0.01: employee psychological empowerment correlates positively with
employee service quality

• Hypothesis testing: based on HML model

- Main relationships among the three levels of empowerment:
 • H1a supported: γ = 0.62, p< 0.01. Organizational empowerment climate correlates
positively with employee psychological empowerment.
• H1b supported: γ = 0.67, p< 0.01. Organizational empowerment climate correlates
positively with department psychological empowerment.
• H2 supported: γ = 0.63, p< 0.01. Department psychological empowerment
correlates positively with emote psychological empowerment.
To assess the relative contributions of organizational empowerment climate and
department psychological empowerment when explaining variance in employee
psychological empowerment, the authors compared variance explained by one
predictor to the total variance explained by two predictors:
13.13% of the variance in employee psychological empowerment is
explained by organizational empowerment climate, subtracted from 17.68%
of the total variance explained by both organization and department
empowerment, gives an indication of the effect size of department
psychological empowerment — department psychological empowerment
explained 17.68% - 13.13% = 4.55% of the variance in employee
psychological empowerment
Similarly, 17.12% of the variance in employee psychological empowerment
is explained by department empowerment, subtracted from 17.68% of the
variance explained by both organization and department empowerment —
organizational empowerment climate explained 17.68% - 17.12% = 0.56% of
the variance in employee psychological empowerment.
0.56% < 4.55% organization empowerment climate explained less than that
explained by department psychological empowerment. This result suggests
that organizational empowerment has a smaller direct effect on employee
psychological empowerment than department psychological empowerment
does.

- Mediation effects of department psychological empowerment and employee psychological

empowerment:
• H3 supported: Department psychological empowerment mediates the relationship
between organizational empowerment climate and employee psychological
empowerment:
Step 1: H1a is supported because γ = 0.62, p< 0.01. Organizational
empowerment climate correlates positively with employee psychological
empowerment, meeting the first requirement that the independent variable
(organizational) relates to the dependent variable (individual).
Step 2: H1b is supported because γ = 0.67, p< 0.01. Organizational
empowerment climate correlates positively with department psychological
empowerment, meeting the second requirement that independent variable
(organizational) relates to the mediator (department).
Step 3: Both organization- and department-level empowerment were
included in a regression, γ = 0.54, p< 0.01 means department psychological
 empowerment relates positively to employee psychological empowerment; γ
= 0.27, p< 0.01 means organizational empowerment climate still remain
positive effect on employee psychological empowerment but reduced
(0.27<0.62 in step 1), H3 supported.
• H4 partially supported: employee psychological empowerment partially mediates
the relationship between department psychological empowerment and service
quality.
Step 1: γ = 0.23, p< 0.01. Department psychological empowerment
correlated positively with employee service quality, meeting the first
requirement that the independent variable (department) relates to the
dependent variable (service quality)
Step 2: γ = 0.63, p< 0.01. Department psychological empowerment
correlated positively with employee psychological empowerment, meeting
the second requirement that independent variable (department) relates to
the mediator (individual).
Step 3: Both department- and individual-level empowerment were included
in a regression, γ = 0.1, p< 0.01 means employee psychological
empowerment relates positively to employee service quality; γ = 0.17, p< 0.1
means department psychological empowerment still remain positive effect on
employee service but reduced (0.17<0.23 in step 1), H4 partially supported
because p does not meet the requirement of less than 0.05 but still
considered as acceptable.

- Moderator effects of organizational empowerment climate, department psychological

empowerment and organization SBE on the relationship of employee psychological
empowerment and service quality: since it is difficult for researchers to find significant
interaction effects in empirical studies, especially with cross-level interactions, 0.1
significance was used rather than 0.01
• H5a supported: Organizational empowerment climate moderates the effect of
individual psychological empowerment on service quality such that the effect is
stronger when there is a positive empowerment climate. γ = 0.14, p < 0.05,
Employee psychological empowerment and organizational empowerment climate
interaction was significant; △X2(1) = 3.27, p < 0.1 means Model 7 offers
improvements to model fit compared to Model 6.
Simple slope analysis: employee psychological empowerment had a positive
effect on employee service quality (slope = 0.19, T(49) = 2.82, p < 0.01)
within a high (mean + 1 standard deviation) degree of organizational
empowerment climate, but this effect was not observed (slope = 0.02, T(49) =
0.41, p > 0.1) within a low (mean - 1 standard deviation) degree of
organizational empowerment climate.

• H5b not supported: γ = 0.02 , p > 0.1Department psychological empowerment did

not moderates the effect of individual psychological empowerment on individual
performance such that the effect is stronger when there is positive department
psychological empowerment. Employee psychological empowerment and
department psychological empowerment interaction was non-significant; △X2(1)
= 0.19, p> 0.1 means Model 7 does not offer improvements to model fit compared
to Model 3.
Department psychological empowerment does not moderate the relationship
between employee psychological empowerment and service quality — the
controversies (inconsistency) below is probably why the non-significant
interaction relationship with high departmental psychological empowerment
did not guarantee the effectiveness of employee psychological empowerment
on service quality, and recommend that this relationship be tested in future
research — why no significant moderation effect was found in departmental
psychological empowerment on the relationship between employee
psychological empowerment and service quality.
 This result suggests that organizational and departmental
empowerment influence employees through the distinct intervention
mechanism — the influence of the same variable at organizational
and group levels might differ regarding outcome frequency and
immediacy.
Controversies remain in research concerning the relationship
between team and individual empowerment.
Criticism: Some argues shat granting teams more
empowerment detracts from individual empowerment because
an individual might perceive less autonomy on a team in which
decision-making and responsibilities must be shared among
members. Some empirical studies demonstrate that employees
in self-led groups decrease their satisfaction and commitment,
and increase absenteeism, burnout, stress, and turnover,
because of associated pressures and duties to implement work.
Proponent: Some scholars argue that empowering a team does
not drain individual empowerment since high team
empowerment compensates for low individual empowerment,
and reduces the need to empower each individual member of a
team.
• H6 supported: organizational SBE moderates the effect of individual
psychological empowerment on service quality such that the effect is stronger
when there is a high degree of SBE. γ = 0.12, p < 0.05, Employee psychological
empowerment and organizational SBE interaction was significant; △X2(1) = 2.75,
p < 0.1 means Model 9 offers improvements to model fit compared to Model 8.
Simple slope analysis: when organizational SBE was high, employee
psychological empowerment had a positive effect on employee service
quality (slope = 0.19, T(49) = 2.95, p < 0.01), but this effect was not observed
when organizational SBE was low (slope = 0.03, T(49) = 0.45, p > 0.1).
- Therefore:
• A cascading mechanism was found across three levels of empowerment by which
department psychological empowerment mediates the influence of organizational
empowerment climate on employee psychological empowerment, and employee
psychological empowerment mediates the influence of department psychological
empowerment on employee service quality.
• Employee psychological empowerment has a positive effect on service quality only
in a high degree of organizational empowerment climate and SBE.
(Jayesh): Max. 5.5 mins
✤ Discussion and Implications
• Especially important for hospitality
- Nowadays, faced with fierce market competition, motivating frontline employees to be
high-quality service providers relates to a hospitality and tourism firm’s competitive
advantage. Frontline employees need the authority to respond promptly to the individual
needs of customers in creakingly unpredictable service circumstances.
• Managerial implications
- To develop a truly effective empowerment system, hospitality and tourism managers need
to consider the importance of both structural and psychological empowerment
perspectives:
• At organizational level, managers need to
✓ Create an organizational empowerment climate by:
- Well design organizational empowerment practices and procedures and
facilitate development and execution of policies and programs that link to
dimensions of an empowerment climate such as empowering a
department and sharing information.
- Create and share a common vision for employees at all levels, translate
the vision into specific and important goals, such as service gaol, cost-
saving goal, and timelines to decreases ambiguity.
- Empower departments with the authority to make decisions for
themselves and create cost effective and quality operations within the
department.
- Get financial, operational and performance information important to
organizations into the hands of frontline employees so they can make
responsible decisions.
- Ensure department managers execute empowerment policies and practices
successfully.
✓ Build an SBE system to guarantee the effectiveness of employee psychological
empowerment on service quality:
- Establish behavior criteria, selecting evaluators, designing rewards, and
feed backing on assessment results.
- Increase manager commitment to service quality, participate in quality
improvement and crate a service culture through a shared system of
beliefs, values, attitudes, and norms of behaviors to foster and maintain a
positive SBE climate.
- Set up appropriate behavior criteria and bound employee service
behaviors to the evaluation system, which helps employees align
behaviors with the organization’s goals to provide high-value services to
customers.
 - To evaluate employees' service-oriented behaviors objectively and
accurately, organizations must choose managers with characteristics of
honesty, fairness, and responsibility.
- Managers need to observe their subordinates' behaviors closely and offer
consider- able mentoring and timely feedback on subordinates' efforts.
- Reward and incentive systems with desired service behaviors must be
designed to guarantee successful implementation of SBE.
- Based on assessment results, hospitality and tourism firms must figure out
employees' problematic behaviors, explore the causes of the problems,
provide direction and mentoring for behavior improvement, and develop
goals and plans for the next stage.
• At department level, since department psychological empowerment paramount
mechanism that connects contextual factors and individual service quality,
managers should
✓ Execute policies and practices defined by top managers to create an
empowerment climate within distinct work units.
✓ Middle managers play the role of coach and remover of obstacles regarding
tasks that frontline employees perform:
- Helping employees underwent the organizational empowerment program
and consider whether all empowerment practices are implemented well in
the department
- Encouraging department employees to set their own goals and self-
manage their tasks
- Encouraging employees to take initiative with improving work
performance
- Involving employees in decisions, using guidelines to help employees
learn to act with responsibility and autonomy.
• for example, exerting broader motivational influences by encouraging employees to
set their own goals, sharing information, rewards, and knowledge with employees
and heightening employee’s self-efficacy and personal control over their tasks.
Self-efficacy: the extent of one's belief in one's own ability to complete tasks
and reach goals.
(Jenny): Max. 7 mins

A Longitudinal Analysis of An Accelerating Effect of Empowerment on Job

Satisfaction: Customer-contact vs. Non-customer-contact workers

(Lee, Kim & Perdue, 2016)

Lee, G., Kim, P., & Perdue, R. (2016). A longitudinal analysis of an accelerating effect of
empowerment on job satisfaction: Customer-contact vs. non-customer-contact workers.
International Journal Of Hospitality Management, 57, 1-8. doi: 10.1016/j.ijhm.2016.05.006

The second article is called ‘A Longitudinal Analysis of An Accelerating Effect of Empowerment

on Job Satisfaction: Customer-contact vs. Non-customer-contact workers’. As mentioned by Yichun
that the impacts of empowerment might be inconsistent in different occasions, this research is
designed:
✤ Purpose

• To examine whether the impact of empowerment on job satisfaction increases as time changes,
and whether this impact is stronger for customer-contact employees than non-customer-contact
employees.

✤ Background of the Article

• Current Research Gaps:
- Few attempts have been made to investigate whether the positive impact of empowerment
on employees’ responds is differently influenced by the nature of work.
- Few empirical studies have been made to examine the impacts of empowerment on job
satisfaction over time.

✤ Objectives and Hypothesis

• Objective 1: to examine whether the impact of empowerment on job satisfaction is more obvious
for customer-contact service work groups than for non-customer-contact work groups.
➡ Hypothesis 1: the positive effect of empowerment on job satisfaction is stronger for
customer-contact employee groups than for their non-customer-contact work counterparts.
- Particular importance of employee empowerment for customer-contact employees:
Customer-contact workers are often required to promptly provide customers with
heterogeneous and high-quality services in diverse situations, where they often need
sufficient decision latitude to ensure the efficiency. Therefore, employee
empowerment is particularly important for them as it allows them to use more of their
own judgment in promptly dealing with customer service challenges.
• Objective 2: to investigate whether the effect of empowerment on job satisfaction increases or
decreases across time.
➡ Hypothesis 2: the impact of empowerment on job satisfaction increases over time.
 - Tenure: more decision latitudes are expected for individuals with more tenure
Explained by accountability theory: accountability refers to the extent to which an
individual’s contribution to a group is identifiable, while empowerment makes the
contributions of an individual to a group identifiable.
Junior: at or near the beginning of a term of employment, such
accountability might be viewed by an individual as being stressful
Senior: as time passes and the individual acclimates into the group, the stress
associated with such accountability would typically decreases, making
individuals more comfortable with decision-making authority .
Explained by career stages research: there are three distinctive career stages through
which employees progress as they become integrated into an organization, employees
at different career stages would have different expectations from their management.
Establishment - Advancement - Maintenance: employees in an early career
stage who are given less complex work tasks are less likely ob influence by
levels of job autonomy.
• Objective 3: to examine whether the impacts of empowerment on job satisfaction over time differ
between for customer-contact service work groups and for non-customer-contact service work
groups.
- Considering the theories of the previous two, the authors thereby propose:
➡ Hypothesis 3: the impacts of empowerment on job satisfaction over time is stronger for
customer-contact service work groups than for non-customer-contact service work groups.

Nature of work:
customer-contact or not

Employee Job
Empowerment Satisfaction

Time: tenure

✤ Methodology

• Brief description:
- HLM. Hierarchical Linear Modeling, a technique of longitudinal multi-level analysis
is used to construct the growth curve models and to test the research hypotheses using a
longitudinal dataset from an annual employee opinion survey conducted by hospitality
company in the U.S. for three consecutive years.
• Sample and procedure:
- Sample: 67 work teams consisting of 1534 employees, namely, over 70% of the employees
in the firm participated in the survey for all three years.
- Survey handling:
• The survey was originally distributed to individual employees
 •
The employees were divided into 67 departments
•
The department-level average scores were used for research due to reasons related
to data confidentiality
• Each average score was weighted with the number of employees in the

corresponding department.
• Measurement of Job Satisfaction
- Four items anchored with (1) strongly disagree and (7) strongly disagree, proved to b
relevant and internal reliable (homogeneity):
• I am satisfied with my job
• I am satisfied with the kind of work I am currently doing
• I am satisfied with the level of challenge in my current job
• I look forward to coming to work

• Measurement of Employee Empowerment

- Four items anchored with (1) strongly disagree and (7) strongly disagree, proved to be
relevant and internal reliable (homogeneity):
• My supervisors give me the freedom I need to do my job well
• My supervisors trust me to use my judgment to solve problems
• My supervisor assigns me a job, but allows me to decide how I do it
• My supervisor encourages me to use my initiative to solve job problems

• Analysis of Data
Ytj(Job Satisfaction) = π0i + π︎1i (Time)ti + ︎π2i (Empowerment)ti +︎ π3i (Empowerment ∗ Time)ti + eti
✤ Results (Main Findings)
• Preliminary analysis: based on simple descriptive analysis
Customer-contact group Non-customer group
Job satisfaction Empowerment Job satisfaction Empowerment
Time 0 4.79 5.42 4.75 5.22
Time 1 4.95 5.56 4.88 5.50
Time 2 5.00 5.71 5.35 5.55
- Both job satisfaction and empowerment of the two groups had similar initial scores
- Both job satisfaction and empowerment of the two groups showed similar growth pattern
• Customer-contact group indicated slightly higher growth of empowerment
• Non-customer-contact group indicated apparently higher job satisfaction growth
• Longitudinal analysis: based on HML model
- Baseline model: only the intercepts for the initial score and growth component (time) were
specified.

• The mean of initial job satisfaction was 4.76 at time 0;

• The average growth rate over time was 0.19 for each year since time 0;
• Both random effects were significant, meaning that there were significant variations
among groups in terms of initial job satisfaction and growth rates of job satisfaction
over time.

- Conceptual model: the complete version of analysis

• The initial average job satisfaction of customer-contact group is 4.71, being
identical to the average job satisfaction of non-customer-contact group, since
‘customer-contact was 0.16 points higher than non-customer-contact group’ was not
statistically significant with p>0.05.
• The average growth rate of job satisfaction over time for non-customer-contact
group is 0.31, the number for customer-contact group is 0.29 points lower.
• H1 Supported: the effect of employee empowerment on job satisfaction is stronger
for customer-contact employees than for non-customer-contact employees —— β20
= 0.31 (p<0.01) means a significant positive effect of empowerment on job
satisfaction for non-customer-contact group, while β21 = 0.51 (p<0.01) means that
the customer-contact group indicated a 0.51 points higher effect of empowerment
on satisfaction than the non-customer-contact group.
• H2 Supported: the effect of empowerment accelerates over the years —— β30 =
0.35 (p<0.01) means the interaction effect of empowerment on job satisfaction
varied significantly over time at an average growth rate of 0.35.
• H3 Denied: the effect of empowerment on job satisfaction over time for customer-
contact service work groups is not significantly stronger than than for non-
customer-contact service work groups —— β31 = 0.04 (p>0.05) means no
significant trend difference was found between the two groups. A possible
explanation is that the time-caring effect accounted for most of the variance, and
thus it was too hard to detect the moderating impact of work nature.
(Jayesh): Max. 2.5 mins
✤ Discussion and Implications
• Why important for hospitality:
- This research is particularly important for hospitality industry, because the core element of
the industry is about heterogeneous service encounters, that there are lots of customer-
contact workers being faced with the stress of unpredictable questions and disagreeable
customers. They need sufficient decision latitude to make reactions to the diverse situations
based on their judgment promptly. Managers in the industry should make use of the
findings of the research to implement appropriate empowerment practices.
• Managerial takeaways from the findings:
- Based on the supported H1 (the effect of employee empowerment on job satisfaction is
stronger for customer-contact employees than for non-customer-contact employees):
Managers need to take the nature of job into consideration, empowering especially
employees who actually deliver customer service, designing induction and training
programs appropriate for customer-contact and non-customer-contact groups respectively.
- Based on the supported H2 (the effect of empowerment accelerates over the years):
Managers need to take into career stages into consideration to implement long-term
empowerment strategies since the impact of empowerment on job satisfaction accelerates
as time passes:
• Be more generous to empower workers who are able to perform advanced tasks
(who have been in the positions for longer tenure), given that the experienced and
competent employees are likely to expect more decision latitudes and
accountability than their junior counterparts, and will feel more dissatisfied if the
decision latitude level has withheld or lessened.
• Be more prudent to empower junior employees, since allowing too much delegation
to workers at earlier employment stages might go over their experience and
competence, make them stressful, and lead to undesirable work outcomes to
Managers need to.
- Based on the denied H3 (actually the effect of empowerment on job satisfaction over
time for customer-contact service work groups is not significantly stronger than than
for non-customer-contact service work groups): Managers need to have long-term
empowerment strategies for both customer-contact and non-customer-contact employees
since there was no significant difference found the accelerates effects of empowerment on
their job satisfaction over time, in another words, regardless of the type of work, the time
varying effects of empowerment on job satisfaction exists.