توانمندسازی در سازمان های مهمان نوازی : مشتری مداری و حمایت سازمانی

Although empowering employees has often been prescribed as an efficient strategy for hospitality organizations, the strategy alone cannot ensure success. Individual and organizational factors should be considered to increase employees’ perception of empowerment. This study examines the impact of employees’ customer orientation and organizational factors on the employee empowerment perceptions. Our findings, based on a survey of 203 guest contact employees, suggest that organizations should hire customer oriented people, guide them with service training, provide a reward system, and facilitate service standards communication in order to increase perceived empowerment. Implications of these findings for hospitality service managers are discussed.

Employee empowerment is described as enabling or authorizing employees to make decisions to solve guest issues by themselves (Conger and Kanugo, 1988 and Jha and Nair, 2008). Empowerment is especially advocated for heterogeneous services where guest contact employees need to adapt their behaviors to the demands of each and every service encounter (Chebat and Kollias, 2000 and Ueno, 2008). Although many hospitality organizations have come to expect employee empowerment to result in improved service quality and guest satisfaction, its effectiveness may be limited if the factors required to cultivate and nurture it do not exist. Two factors that should be considered are: individual and organizational factors (Koberg et al., 1999). Previous research suggests that some employees may perform better than others because they are more willing, able, or talented (Berry et al., 1988 and Chebat and Kollias, 2000). Thus, empowerment must be accompanied by a careful recruitment effort to select “empowerable” employees who can be inculcated with the skills and attitude conducive to exercising an acceptable and responsible decision making (Hales and Klidas, 1998). Researchers also suggest that employees’ perceptions of the work environment are a necessary consideration in the empowerment process (Robbins et al., 2002). Some researchers suggest that service organizations should invest in service skills training to enhance the ability of employees to meet the complex service demands of customers (Schlesinger and Heskett, 1991 and Varca, 2004). Other researchers emphasize the importance of rewards in order to influence employees’ behavior (Hartline and Ferrell, 1996 and Gkorezis and Petridou, 2008). In addition, service standards of internal service quality should be communicated and understood by all members of the organization, including line employees, so that employees are more confident to act autonomously (Lytle et al., 1988 and Yoon et al., 2007). These previous studies suggest that employees will not necessarily feel empowered without appropriate perceptions of service training, rewards, and service standards communication in the organization. Although empowering guest contact employees has often been prescribed as an efficient strategy for hospitality organizations, individual and organizational factors should be considered to gain more insight into employees’ perception of empowerment. A few studies examined either people factors or organizational factors, but rarely both. We believe that understanding these two factors is important to provide useful insights into employee empowerment. This study examines the impact of employee customer orientation and organizational supporting factors on perceived empowerment. We specifically focus on customer orientation, training, rewards, and service standard communication. The findings of this study can add to the literature of employee empowerment by addressing the effects of employees’ individual customer orientation tendency and organizational supporting system on perceived empowerment through an empirical examination. The results also offer managerial insights into acquiring and developing customer oriented guest contact employees who may best provide quality guest service via empowerment in a service oriented organization.

Previous research contended that the front-line employee plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of empowerment in the hospitality industry (Lashley, 1999 and Jha and Nair, 2008). It is easily assumable that service oriented organizations encourage employee empowerment. Yet, it was not clear whether the employee's own characteristics increase employee empowerment or not. Also, there was a lack of research as to which organizational supporting factors can contribute to employee empowerment. Our findings suggest that service management should consider employees’ customer orientation characteristics in order to implement a successful empowerment program. Moreover, service organizations should have appropriate organizational supporting systems including service training, service rewards, and service communication to increase employee empowerment. Employee's customer orientation is an important antecedent of their perceived empowerment. In other words, the more employees describe themselves as customer oriented, the more they felt confident about their job performance and meaningfulness of their jobs. The theme park industry is considered to have an “entertainment” element in the business and employees are expected to create service experiences for guests (Anh and Kleiner, 2005). Hiring the right people who naturally enjoy customer interactions is particularly important due to the emotional content of the work in the theme park industry (Aragon and Kleiner, 2003). Theme park guest contact employees’ work, such as, using creativity to please guests in order to exceed their expectations and exercising discretion in their dealings with guests, can be performed better when customer oriented employees are selected for the job. Although, customer orientation did not necessarily increase the sense of their impact on the organization, organizational supporting factors, such as, training, rewards, and service standards communication did increase the perception of their influence in the workplace. In other words, when the employees perceive that they receive good service training, benefit from a reward system for good service/job performance, and understand service standards (i.e., internal service quality expectations are well communicated), employees view it as they are making a greater impact in the workplace. Newly hired theme park employees receive an orientation that provides new comers with company culture, policies, service standards and guidelines, and initial job training. For example, the new employees at Disney attend Disney University and learn that work is a theater and employees are actors who perform the show (Aragon and Kleiner, 2003). Good service training guides and enhances employees’ service skills to provide excellent services. In addition, clear and open communication of service standards helps employees understand the level of service expectations for the particular company and know what rules to break when it is necessary to provide extraordinary services. Also, recognizing and rewarding excellent service performance can not only motivate rewarded employees but also send a strong message to other employees to provide exceptional services. These organizational efforts can help employees understand the significance of each employee's work in the organization. Finally, both service standard communication and service rewards increase employee perception of the empowerment impact dimension. As employees perceived being well aware of service standards and motivated by the service rewards system, they viewed their job as more meaningful and important. Theme park service organizations are often large corporations with a large number of employees and an individual employee may not easily realize how their work contributes to the organization. Good service standards communication and rewards system can provide employees with a sense of importance of the work that they are performing.