Literature review of “IMPACT OF EMPOWERMENT ON EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE”

Academic interest in the association between strategic decision-making speed and firm performance emerged
initially when Bourgeois and Eisenhardt identified a positive association between fast strategic decision-making
and firm performance. There are few subsequent empirical studies of strategic decision speed; however,
management advisors have repeatedly prescribed fast decision-making as a source of competitive advantage,
and practitioners claim they increasingly make strategic decisions in less time. Our objectives are; to clarify the
relationship between strategic decision speed and firm performance,and to better understand the forces that
impact strategic decision speed. Our results suggest that aspects of organization design and environmental
selection that are within managerial control are capable of influencing the speed with which strategic decisions
can be made.

Three studies examined cross-cultural variations in empowe-rment effects, Study 1; verified on job satisfaction
using world values survey data, Study 2; surveyed frontline hotel employee from Canada and PRC to
invetigate the moderating role of power distance at the individual level, Study 3; hotel management students
from Canada and PRC were asked to play the role of frontline employee. Three cross-cultural studies are
presented to test our propositions that empowerment effects vary with (a) the cultural value of power distance,
and (b) the innate and situational factors that influence the employees' desire to satisfy customer needs and
wants. STUDY 1 To examine the cross-cultural variation in empowerment effects, conducted an hierarchical
linear modelling analysis of the data of World Values Survey II, a large-scale, multi-nation survey. Between
1990 and 1993, 57,561 adults aged 18 years and above from 42 nations were interviewed by professional
survey organisations in Western nations and by local academic institutes in Eastern European nations. At the
individual level, job satisfaction was regressed on job autonomy for each society. At the society level, power
distance and wealth predicted the within-society regression slopes that indicate the degree of association
between job autonomy and job satisfaction. STUDY 2 in this study we used validated measures to test, at the
individual level, the moderating effect of power distance on the relationship between empowerment and job
satisfaction. Surveys were conducted in Toronto, Canada, and Beijing, People's Republic of China (PRC), on
frontline employees of up-scale hotels. Two graduate students from the hotel school of a local university visited
27 four- and five-star hotels in the Greater Toronto area and interviewed hotel employees with drop-off
questionnaires. Working in international hotel chains to serve local and non-local tourists and business
travellers may incur relatively higher pay, job status and job satisfaction for PRC employees than for Canadian
employees, and this may explain why a positive relationship between power distance and job satisfaction is
found in Study 2. STUDY 3 Empowerment was manipulated by whether or not discretionary power was given
to the subjects in handling the customer request. The nature of the request was operationalised as whether the
customer offered a good reason in support of the special request. The study adopted a 2 (empowerment: present
or absent) x 2 (request nature: with or without good reason) x 2 (nation: Canada or PRC) full factorial design.
The first two factors were manipulated using information embedded in a scenario that described a service
encounter between an employee and a customer of a hotel. Subjects from the two nations were randomly
assigned to one of the four scenarios (2 empowerment conditions x 2 request nature conditions) and answered
questions after reading the assigned scenario. Results indicated that the main effects of empowerment and
request nature on intention to comply were significant. Subjects reported significantly greater intention to
comply with the customer request when they were given discretionary power and when the request was
accompanied by a good reason.

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 Literature review of “IMPACT OF EMPOWERMENT ON EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE”

Empowerment in the workplace is a popular idea that has permitted both the popular and scientific literature.
Empowerment is a tool to encourage workers to think for themslves about requirement of the job. Empower-
ment involves learning how to take initiatives and to respond creatively to the challenges of the job.
Empowered employees are generally more satisfied with their jobs. A longuctitudinal predicive design was
used to test a model linking changes in structural and psychological empowerment to changes in job
satisfaction. The original sampling consisting of 600 nurses randomly selected from the college of nurses of
Ontario registry list. Three self-report scales were used in this study: the condition of work effectiveness
questionnaire-II, Spreitzer’s psychological empowerment scale, and a global job satsfaction scale. The items for
each questionnaire were rated on a five-point likert scale. Results suggests that variation in job satisfaction
depends more on changing in level of structural empowerment than on the level of job satsfaction.

Empowerment is the most popular concept among modern management and organization applications, which
improves the decisional authorities of employees. In the labor intensive tourism sector, empowerment
increasing the employees’ productivity and ensuring the organizational efficiency. The success of hotel
enterprises which give priority to customer satisfaction and personnel satisfaction depend on the quality of the
personnel and on a continuous increase in this quality. The main purpose of this research is to obtain beneficial
results by testing the efficiency of the employee empowerment variables determined by theoretical information.
The analyses outcomes show that the managers did not give the necessary support on this subject. The increase
of the responsibility increase motivation and empowerment acheives its real meaning mainly in service
enterprises. It is important that employees use their authority in a way to benefit the enterprise and themselves.

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 Literature review of “IMPACT OF EMPOWERMENT ON EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE”

In this study, we connect to two research traditions that have opened some promising perspectives in explaining
frontline employee performance levels. The first relates to empowerment dynamics in the workplace; the
second to management control dynamics. A first major objective of this research was to address these
limitations, by exploring the relationship between structural and psychological empowerment, and by trying to
understand the counterintuitive finding that intrinsic motivation only has a modest impact on performance
levels. Another major objective of this research is to explore the role of alternative intervening variables that
may help in explaining the impact of formal control on work related job outcomes. A final important objective
of this research is therefore to explore the interplay between empowerment and control dynamics. First, we
made two significant contributions to empowerment theory. A first contribution is that we, both conceptually
and empirically, linked the structural and employee perspective on empowerment. We found that empowerment
at the employee level mediates the relationship between structural empowerment and employee performance
outcomes. We also found that structural empowerment does not unequivocally translate into psychological
empowerment felt by employee within their specific working role. We proposed several theoretical
explanations for this leakage between structural and employee empowerment that open some avenues for
further investigation. A second contribution is that we clarified why past research showed a very modest
relationship between empowerment and performance levels. A first exp lanation is that empowerment is a goal-
directed process. This suggests that the “power” in empowerment is not available for all ends and that it is
useful to take the goal specificity of organizational intentions, individual behavior and outcomes into account in
assessing the impact of empowerment practices on employee performance levels. A second explanation is that
transactional leadership moderates the empowerment performance relationship. Second, we contribute to
management control theory by identifying several alternative mediating variables that link outcome and
behavioral control to important work related outcome variables. these findings clearly expand the conceptual
structure surrounding the management control concept and compellingly illustrate the usefulness of these
constructs in explaining the impact of outcome and behavioral control in the workplace. our findings indicate
that the amount of behavioral control as such does not influence autonomy levels. Instead, our research
indicates that both empowerment and behavioral control are valuable in optimizing the work context.
Theoretically more important however, our findings indicate that the beneficial effects of empowerment
practices reflect a mo tivational, energizing dynamic, while the beneficial role of behavioral control reflects a
competencedevelopment dynamic.

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