Employee Empowerment

Employee empowerment in services: a framework for analysis
Conrad Lashley
The School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, UK
Keywords Employees, Empowerment, Hospitality industry, Service Abstract Employee empowerment is said to benefit all organisations. The fast moving global economy requires that organisations learn and adapt to change quickly, and employees have a key role to play here. This is particularly true in modern service organisations. The empowered employee is said to respond more quickly to customer service requests, act to rectify complaints and be more engaged in service encounters. A more reflective approach suggests there are different managerial perceptions of empowerment, resulting in empowerment being introduced in different service organisations in different ways, and presenting different benefits to managers and working experiences for the empowered. This paper suggests that a framework of analysis needs to be developed which goes beyond the more simplistic claims which tend to discuss empowerment as that which is labelled empowerment. The success or failure of an initiative which claims to be empowering will be determined by the experience of being empowered.

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Introduction Employee empowerment has been hailed as a management technique which can be applied universally across all organisations as a means of dealing with the needs of modern global business (Barry, 1993: Johnson, 1993; Foy, 1994), and across all industrial sectors. However, the service sector is said to involve a unique cluster of tension which managers, employees and customers have to address (Heskett et al., 1990), and the empowerment of employees is an approach which has been advocated for service sector management (Sternberg, 1992; Lockwood, 1996). Investigation of the use of empowerment in service sector organisations reveals a number of different forms of empowerment being applied in

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