Empowerment: HR Strategies for Service Excellence

Conrad Lashley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136406829
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

'Empowerment: HR strategies for service excellence' shows managers and students the importance of empowerment as part of human resource strategy. It provides a critical perspective of this established vital management technique, identifying factors that will lead to a win: win situation for all concerned. When successfully incorporated as part of HR strategy, empowerment can: * enable organizations to gain commercial and competitive advantage * become more flexible * improve employee commitment * use the skills of individual employees to best advantage and enhance personal capabilities. 'Empowerment: HR strategies for service excellence' uses case studies from companies such as McDonalds, TGI Fridays and Harvester Restaurants to build a picture of empowerment of service employees in context, illustrating how different forms of empowerment are employed and different working arrangements are practiced.

1

Understanding
empowerment: a
framework of
analysis

• Definitions and meanings

• Empowering the organization

• Researching empowerment

It is true to say that the ‘age of empowerment’ (Senge et al., 1999: 11) has become a key rhetoric of the last decades of the twentieth century. Whether in social, political or employment fields, commentators use empowerment in a variety of contexts and with a variety of intentions. Indeed, empowerment is used by so many people, in such a variety of ways, that the term is almost becoming meaningless. Certainly, any serious discussion of the topic needs to define terms and establish the assumptions upon which the commentary is based.

In the employment field there has been a burgeoning literature on employee empowerment, mostly written from a ‘normative’ perspective. That is, a perspective that identifies the functions that empowerment ‘serves’ or ‘should serve’ in organizations (Senge et al., 1999). These texts provide guides as to the aspirations of academics and/or practitioners who advocate empowerment as an approach to organizational management in the current competitive environment (Johnson and Redmond, 1998).

‘Empowerment is about achieving organizational goals; it means getting everyone involved in making a success of the business.’ (Johnson and Redmond, 1998: xv). According to the advocates, empowered organizations will gain commercial advantages and will be more competitive. Furthermore, they suggest that more traditional command and control structures disempower organization members (Belbin, 1998). Empowered organizations will become the norm in the modern, or ‘post-modern’, age and the traditional disempowered organizations will be driven from business under the weight of competitive pressure, inflexibility and atrophy.

This chapter explores these arguments and approaches by first establishing a range of meanings provided by the various writers and practitioners, the organization adjustments needed by empowered organizations and the benefits seen to be achieved by firms that empower their workforce. Finally, the chapter introduces a model for understanding the impact of empowerment and aims to provide a corrective to the more evangelical claims of many commentators.

Definitions and meanings

Some definitions of empowerment start with a discussion of empowerment in relation to delegation of authority. In fact, one definition of ‘empower’ given in the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that it means ‘to invest legally or formally with power: to authorize, license.’ On the other hand some writers (Foy, 1994) are keen to distance the definition from merely intensifying the delegation of authority. Nancy Foy provides a nice example that both helps with the distinction between empowerment and delegation, and reveals something of the assumptions and mind set underpinning many aspirations for empowerment. She says ‘If you give your 12-year-old daughter money to buy jeans, that's delegation … If you give her a clothes allowance which she can spend as she chooses, that's empowerment’ (p. 4).

Stewart (1994) suggests that managers need to draw distinctions between being in authority and being an authority. Again she uses a child–parent example to explain differences between being in authority and thereby having the power to make decisions that are to be obeyed, ‘as when telling a child to go to bed’ (p. 2), and being an authority ‘on the sleeping habits of children’. Empowering managers act as authorities for empowered employees.

Apart from the normative content of both these definitions, the examples employed reveal much about the assumptions that underpin some definitions of empowerment, namely that the empowerer is in a more powerful position than the empowered, and the empowered have empowerment done to them. This is not a negotiated process. Hence there is an implicit imbalance built in to the notion of empowerment. The example by Nancy Foy implies that empowerment is determined by the more senior authority and the empowered operate within the boundaries set. So in her case, the child is given a clothing allowance. The budget head is defined, the money is to be spent on clothes, rather than being given an allowance with the freedom to spend the money as she sees fit.

This draws a parallel with the definition of empowerment given by several other writers, namely that empowerment is about deciding on the boundaries of what the empowered are able to do (van Outdshoorn and Thomas, 1993) and the empowered operate within the boundaries laid down. van Outdshoorn and Thomas also provide another insight into empowerment in that they make a distinction between the objective facts of what the empowered are ‘given authority or permission’ (p. 4) to do, and the subjective feelings of power, energy and ability generated within the supposedly empowered. This presents some possible differences in perceptions, which will be discussed more fully later. In the first instance the potential difference between subjective feelings and the objective limits on empowerment hints at political processes involved. Decisions about what the empowered are allowed, and not allowed, to do suggests potential differences in perceptions between those deciding on the boundaries and those who have to work within them. Second, the presence of subjective feelings implies that there may be subjective differences between individuals. Both these aspects require much more discussion than is usual in the more ‘evangelical’ literature. For these commentators the notion that political processes are involved is rarely discussed, and there is little recognition that people may differ in their orientations to work or expectations for power and a sense of personal worth associated with work.

Where the responses of the empowered are discussed, they often slide into humanistic generalizations. There is an implicit and explicit assumption that the empowered are just waiting to be liberated from the oppressive experiences. ‘Empowerment is the realization and actualization of potential and opportunity just waiting to be unleashed,’ (Johnson, 1993: 32).

Traditional organization structures based on Weberian formal rationality, Taylorist work organization, and command and control power relations (Johnson and Redmond, 1998) are ‘disempowering’ (Potterfield, 1999) because traditional structures create feelings of powerlessness (Johnson, 1993). Setting this within the context of the justification for empowerment, these traditional structures are seen as representing the source of many organizational and even social problems. Thus problems of worker alienation and generally low levels of employee commitment, and feelings of anomie in society are all caused by feelings of disempowerment and a sense of powerlessness. For writers such as these, empowerment goes beyond the needs of the current business climate; it is essential to resolving the tensions in the employment relationship, and in society at large.

Some writers, (Senge et al., 1999) define empowerment as persuading employees to take total responsibility for their own job satisfaction. In these cases the organizational task is to encourage employees to consider what they like and dislike about their jobs and ‘probe their own motives and discover what would make their jobs more interesting’ (Barry, 1993: 24). The empowerment of employees through releasing their talents and abilities, meeting their inner needs, and generally engaging employees with moral commitment (Etzioni, 1961) is deemed to be an essential feature of organizations in the ‘Information Age’. Barry reminds readers of the example of the future organization provided by Drucker (1988). In this view future organizations will resemble orchestras comprised of highly trained and skilled individuals each with specialist skills. Their efforts are orchestrated but the conductor cannot control the sound made by any one individual player. The whole is dependent on the sum total of the individual players exercising their own skills and talents. Hierarchies are minimal and there are no status differences between the various instrument sections. There is, of course, no mention of potential disagreements over the programme to be played and the different workloads that might be involved for various sections of the orchestra.

The link between employee emotional and psychological needs, their untapped abilities and future organizational performance is an important strand in the rhetoric of empowerment. Some writers (Johnson and Redmond, 1998) make specific mention of the need to improve employee commitment to organizational goals and objectives, particularly highlighted in connection with organizational strategies relating to product and service quality (D'Annunzio-Green and Macandrew, 1999). Empowerment is thus frequently linked with total quality management (Rodrigues, 1994), ‘customer oriented organization’ (Bowen and Basch, 1992), a ‘total quality culture’ (Simmons and Teare, 1993), or a ‘service driven culture’ (Hirst, 1992); the assumption being that employee commitment is an essential feature of achieving quality objectives. This particular resonance for service industries will be discussed in more detail later.

Others draw the link between the need for improved employee commitment in the context of increased global competition (Johnson, 1993; Nixon, 1994), and rapid technological change plus the need for greater organizational flexibility (Barry, 1993). In each case it is assumed that empowered employees will be committed to organizational success, and will bring their full range of talents and experiences to play in the achievement of organizational goals. The unitary assumptions underpinning these aspirations for empowerment are not far from the surface in many of these writings. It is taken as axiomatic that there is a community of interests between owners, managers and employees, with all organizational stakeholders having shared aspirations, goals and objectives. Indeed many of these accounts can be accused of being simplistic in their understanding of organizational life and the political dynamics which shape decision making and policies. Typical is a statement by Nancy Foy (1994) in relation to managerial concerns and the need to empower. ‘ Empowering people is as important today as involving them in the 1980s and getting them to participate in the 1970s’ (p. xvii).

Such statements reveal little of the environmental, economic and industrial circumstances that have led to differences in focus and terminology (Rafiq and Ahmed, 1998a). Nor do they consider the continuity of concerns that they reveal about employing organizations. The discourse on employee empowerment in fact reflects both continuity and change in employer concerns. The abiding concerns are to generate employee commitment and ensure optimum effort from employees (Marchington and Wilkinson, 2000). The changing circumstances relate to the changes in labour market conditions whereby organized labour is no longer perceived as a collective threat to managerial prerogatives. And empowerment reflects an attempt to engage employee individually and emotionally. Empowerment represents an attempt to establish moral involvement, ‘…which means that the person intrinsically values the mission of the organization and his or her job, and is personally involved and identifies with the organization’ (Schein, 1988: 45).

It is not accidental that both the terminology used to discuss empowerment, and examples of arrangements that claim to be empowering overlap with these other initiatives. Thus some writers use empowerment and employee involvement (Plunkett and Fournier, 1991) and empowerment and employee participation (Cotton, 1993) interchangeably. There is rarely a recognition of, let alone an attempt to explain or define, the boundaries between them. Similarly, an examination of initiatives that claim to be empowering covers a wide array of arrangements that are also discussed under the headings of participation and involvement.

In the hospitality industry, for example, employee empowerment is a term that has been used to describe quality circles (Accor Group), suggestion schemes (McDonald's Restaurants), customer care programmes (Scott's Hotels), employee involvement in devising departmental standards (Hilton Hotels), autonomous work groups (Harvester Restaurants) and delayering the organization (Bass Taverns). All these different forms are likely to represent different intrinsic and extrinsic rewards to employees and thereby different levels of intensity with which they will be engaged by the organization's objectives.

Table 1.1 Examples of forms of empowerment in hospitality services

Form	Organization
Quality circles	Accor Group
Suggestion schemes	McDonald's Restaurants
‘Whatever it takes’ training	Marriott Hotels
Autonomous work groups	Harvester Restaurants
Delayering the organization	Bass Taverns

Even within the normative notions of what empowerment is supposed to achieve it is possible to evaluate various initiatives and forms of empowerment according to the ‘state of empowerment’ that they generate in the empowered. The likely elements present in the state of being empowered will be discussed more fully in Chapter 2, but having a sense of personal efficacy and worth, individual control together with a sense of power with the freedom to use that power in the achievement of valued goals are likely to be important ingredients (Conger and Kanungo, 1988; Sparrowe, 1994; Siegall and Gardner, 2000).

Whilst the supposed congruence of employee needs and organizational goals is one important strand in the rhetoric of empowerment, it is possible to detect differences in the nature of empowerment in socio-political terms. For some writers (Barbee and Bott, 1991) employee empowerment is defined as ‘the act of vesting responsibility in the people nearest the problem’ whilst for Bowen and Lawler (1992) empowerment covers ‘management strategies for sharing decision making power’.

These two sets of emphases reflect quite different assumptions about the nature of empowerment. In the first case, vesting responsibility can be seen as being concerned with intensification of work. Thus if an employee is told that they are not only responsible for their duties to serve customers, but also for ensuring customer satisfaction or product quality, they may well be brought to account for things which are beyond their control. For example, company policy, customer moods and expectations may impact on perceptions of satisfaction and may be areas beyond the server's control. Dealing with customer complaints, which is frequently a feature of empowerment in service operations, puts the server in difficult and potentially stressful situations. They have to try to placate the customer, or anticipate customer needs. Many service organizations talk about employees aiming to ‘delight the customer’, that is, provide a level of service beyond the customer's expectations of the service they will receive. In other cases, company policy may put contradictory pressures on employees – ‘give customers attentive service and maximize sales’.

Adding extra responsibilities to a person's job can increase the burden of work, produce more stress and represent in intensification of work. In a real sense the individual is having to achieve more within a given work period. Often they are having to manage their feelings to more closely match how they are expected to feel (Mann, 1999). For some workers, empowerment in the form of added responsibilities can be an unwelcome development and, as will be discussed further later, generates resentment from those who ‘only want to work as a waitress’ (Ashness and Lashley, 1995). For others, however, added responsibilities can bring new dimensions to work experiences and exert welcome demands on the empowered. Adding responsibilities can develop a sense of personal ownership and attachment to a specific aspect of the work. Having said that, empowering people by extending responsibilities for a wider range of performance measures does have its limits, not least of which being that operational decision making structures are still left intact. There are still some significant limits on the power of the empowered.

Definitions which reflect Bowen and Lawler's notion that empowerment involves sharing decision making implies that more authority is delegated to the empowered employee. Clearly this means that employees will be given some power to make certain decisions and resolve c...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding empowerment: a framework of analysis
• 2 The psychology of empowerment
• 3 The relational dimension of empowerment
• 4 Forms of empowerment through participation
• 5 Forms of empowerment through involvement
• 6 Forms of empowerment through commitment
• 7 Forms of empowerment through delayering
• 8 Changes in working arrangements
• 9 Feeling empowered
• 10 Improved business performance
• 11 Empowerment and service quality management
• 12 Employment strategy and the service organization
• 13 Empowerment: another flash in the panaceas?
• References
• Index