The empowering,the empowered,and the empowerment disparity: A multilevel analysis of the integrated model of employee empowerment

This study aims to examine an integrated research model of employee empowerment from the perspectives of managers (the empowering) and employees (the empowered) with a newly proposed construct, empowerment disparity that captures a difference in employees' perception of empowerment within a team. A multilevel analysis was conducted using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) to test the hypotheses using a matched sample of 286 restaurant employees along with 51 managers and 2129 customers from five tourist cities in Thailand. The findings show that psychological empowerment and the psychological contract have a positive effect on customers' assessment of interaction quality, and empowerment disparity moderates the links between a manager's empowering behavior and psychological empowerment, and psychological empowerment and the psychological contract. The theoretical and managerial implications suggested by the findings are provided for researchers and practitioners.     

Empowerment in hospitality organizations: Customer orientation and organizational support

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.     

酒店服务品牌内部建设主体的功能与关系研究

服务品牌与产品品牌在原理上一致,但在执行上存在明显差别。服务品牌的建设应该包括内部和外部两个视角,但是现有理论及实践往往仅关注服务品牌外部建设,忽略了服务品牌内部建设。因此,文章基于丽思卡尔顿酒店的案例,探索服务品牌内部建设涉及哪些参与者、各参与者承担哪些角色,以及服务品牌内部与外部建设之间的关系等问题。研究发现,酒店企业服务品牌内部建设的关键流程包括酒店创建者和高层管理者创建并维持服务品牌核心价值、核心价值转变为员工的内在价值、员工"活出品牌"3个方面。服务品牌内部建设与外部建设是"手段"与"目的"的关系,成功的服务品牌内部建设能够更好地确保外部建设的效果。最后,文章提出了酒店企业内部服务品牌建设的管理建议。     

The effects of service climate and internal service quality on frontline hotel employees’ service-oriented behaviors

When employees in a service profit chain receive quality internal services, they provide quality services to external customers, but extant research does not address what connects internal and external services. This study espouses service climate as an integral part of the service profit chain by exploring its role in linking internal service management and external service performance, and the boundary conditions in which it operates. Data collected from 538 employees of 81 department managers in 24 Chinese hotels were examined using hierarchical linear modeling. Results suggest that managers’ commitment to service quality affects service climate through empowering leadership, service climate links empowering leadership and employee service-oriented behaviors, and external departments’ internal service quality strengthens the positive effect of service climate on service-oriented behaviors. This study advances the literature by integrating service climate and internal service quality into the service profit chain, helping hospitality managers understand how to foster service-oriented behaviors.     

Effects of customer incivility on frontline employees and the moderating role of supervisor leadership style

Customer incivility toward frontline employees (FLEs) is a widespread phenomenon within tourism and hospitality industries, severely depleting the psychological resources of FLEs and delivered customer service. Drawing on the job demands-resources and conservation of resources frameworks, the current research compares the effects of the two most common forms of customer incivility on FLEs' psychological responses and behavioral intentions (study 1). Moreover, this work explores the degree to which supervisor leadership style can mitigate the depleting effects of these two forms of customer incivility on FLEs (study 2). Findings demonstrate that FLEs' responses to customer incivility episodes remain contingent upon supervisor's leadership style and acknowledge that an empowering (vs. laissez-faire) leadership style can better mitigate the depleting effects of both customer incivility forms on FLEs' role stress, rumination, retaliation and withdrawal intentions. The implications of these findings for tourism and hospitality theory and practicing managers are discussed.     

A triple whammy effect of employees' gender,job type,and service outcomes on consumer behavior

The extant literature reports inconsistent results regarding the effect of employee gender on customers' attitudes and behaviors. Furthermore, the previous research on congruency bias has mainly focused on female-dominant jobs. To address these issues, this study examined how customers' gender stereotypes affect their service evaluations and revisit intentions. Grounded in role congruity theory, congruency bias, and justification-suppression models, the results showed that employee gender and gender congruency with the norm for the job have differential impacts on customer evaluations. Furthermore, this study found asymmetric impacts of congruency bias on customer experiences. For example, customers showed lower satisfaction and revisit intention when female employees failed in a male-dominant job than when their male counterparts did. However, they showed equal levels of satisfaction and revisit intention when male and female employees failed in a female-dominant job. The results provide important insights into how to reduce customers' gender bias toward different gender-dominated jobs.     

Call Center Employees’ Intent to Quit: Examination of Job Engagement and Role Clarity

Call centers have become a valuable resource for hotels in managing customer experiences and relationships, yet they have also developed a reputation for being a stressful job which has made it a significant challenge to retain employees. Given high turnover rates among call center employees, it is important for hospitality firms to understand the factors influencing their intentions to quit. This study focuses on job engagement and role clarity to examine hotel call center employees’ intent to quit. The survey results of call center employees at a large resort hotel suggest that job engagement significantly influences the hotel call center employees’ intent to quit after accounting for job satisfaction and organizational support. Role clarity, however, is not related to intent to quit. Managerial implications and recommendations for increasing employee job engagement are discussed.     

Why does empowering leadership occur and matter? A multilevel study of Chinese hotels

To address the question of why empowering leadership occurs and matters, this study develops an integrated model including both antecedents and consequences of empowering leadership in hospitality organizations. Drawing on data from 558 employees and 86 department managers in 24 Chinese hotels, results of hierarchical linear modeling support person–situation interactionist theory by suggesting that top-level empowering leadership and middle-level leaders’ self-efficacy have main and interaction effects on middle-level empowering leadership. Main and mediation effect results support service profit chain theory and motivational and exchange-based models by demonstrating that middle-level empowering leadership has positive effects on employees’ service-oriented behaviors directly and indirectly, and employees’ psychological ownership mediates these indirect effects. This study is among the first to explore antecedents of empowering leadership from both personal and contextual perspectives, and mediation by psychological ownership in the relationship between empowering leadership and employee service-oriented behaviors.     

The Effect of Jay-customer Behaviors on Employee Job Stress and Job Satisfaction

Guest-contact employees are often exposed to stressful situations resulting from jay-customer behaviors. The purpose of this study is to examine how jay-customer behaviors (customer incivility and customer aggression) affect employee job stress and job satisfaction. Surveys of 210 participants working as guest-contact employees in hospitality organizations were analyzed. The results show that customer incivility leads to decreased employee job satisfaction, which is fully mediated by increased job stress. The findings of this study suggest that hospitality managers should acknowledge the negative impact of jay-customer behaviors on employees and make efforts to minimize this effect through training, procedures, and supporting systems.     

Disentangling green service innovative behavior among hospitality employees: The role of customer green involvement

Regardless of the role of customers in co-creating value with organizations, how customer involvement drives employees, particularly in the hospitality industry, to engage in green service innovative endeavors has been scarcely examined. This study seeks to uncover how and when customer green involvement nurtures green service innovative behavior among hotel employees. The dataset was formed from the responses from 519 employees and 84 managers working in Vietnam-based hotels and analyzed via multilevel structural equation modeling. The results demonstrated the role of hotel employees’ green information management motivations (i.e., green information proactiveness, transparency, and formality) in mediating the positive relationship between customer green involvement and employee green service innovative behavior. Internal green marketing orientation functioned as an enhancer for the effects of customer green involvement on green information management motivations. This research contributes to the stream of green behavior research by bringing together customer green involvement and green service innovative behavior in the hospitality literature and unraveling the mechanisms behind their relationship.     

Workplace incivility in restaurants: Who’s the real victim? Employee deviance and customer reciprocity

This study expands upon previous literature that focused on examining the impact of managers’ incivility towards their employees and the effects on employee behavior and attitudes, as well as customers’ perceptions and behavior intentions following workplace incivility from the maltreated employees. Using mixed-methods of sequential incident techniques and a scenario-based experiment, the study found that when customers received a good service from the employee who was maltreated by his/her supervisors, customers are more likely to revisit the restaurant and tend to provide more tips to the employee compared to customers who received a bad service from the employee. Also, employees who try to continuously provide a good service to customers regardless of their mistreatment from the manager, trigger customers’ moral unease, thus lead them to give more tips.     

Feeling empowered and doing good? A psychological mechanism of empowerment,self-esteem,perceived trust,and OCBs

Building on agency theory and signaling theory, this study investigated the psychological mechanism of how empowerment impacts hotel frontline employees' self-esteem, perceived trust, and OCBs performed toward both internal and external customers. Using a longitudinal research design with data collected via three waves, the results supported that three out of four dimensions of empowerment had significant and positive influence on employees' self-esteem and perceived trust, both of which are significant predictors for three types of OCBs. The study makes important contributions to literature and suggests that hotel employees feeling empowered can enhance their overall wellness while contributing to their OCB performances. Thus, empowerment should be properly used as a strategy to facilitate employees’ contextual performance.     

How should I respond to a complaining customer? A model of Cognitive-Emotive-Behavioral from the perspective of restaurant service employees

Many studies on coping have been conducted in diverse industries but within the hospitality industry, studies on how employees cope with customer complaints have only just begun, despite the task being one of the most significant stressors amongst service employees. The aim of this paper was to explore the cognitive appraisals, emotional elicitations, emotional coping behavior and complaint handling behavior of service employees. In-depth interviews were conducted with a total of 26 frontline restaurant employees. The results show that service employees engaged in different cognitive appraisals and emotional reactions in response to different customer complaints. Subsequently, they engaged in different emotional coping behaviors including both positive and negative of avoidance and approach. Theoretically, a model was developed to depict a holistic picture of Cognitive-Emotive-Behavioral in a complaint-handling context. The findings might assist industry practitioners to devise better complaint handling and coping strategies to enhance both customer and employee satisfaction.     

旅行社顾客心理授权、顾客参与及服务质量关系研究

顾客在企业授权措施影响下产生的对服务经历的控制感被称之为顾客心理授权.文章在文献研究的基础上,提出了一个包含顾客心理授权、顾客参与、员工服务质量、顾客服务质量和顾客满意感的研究模型,并通过对旅行社顾客的调查,对模型进行了实证检验.数据分析结果表明:(1)顾客心理授权与顾客参与是两个不同的概念,且前者对后者有显著的正向影响;(2)顾客参与通过顾客服务质量间接影响员工服务质量;(3)顾客服务质量和员工服务质量都会影响顾客满意感,且与员工服务质量相比,顾客服务质量对顾客满意感的影响更大.文章研究结果可以丰富学术界对顾客授权理论的研究,同时对旅行社授予顾客权力、鼓励顾客参与,提高顾客服务质量,进而提高顾客满意度有一定的实践参考价值.     

Analysis of Employee Performance during Cross-cultural Service Encounters at Luxury Hotels in Hawaii,London and Florida

Globalization has motivated managers and scholars in the tourism industry to focus more attention on the problems and characteristics of the cross-cultural service encounter. During these interactions, differing cultural norms and values often create misunderstanding and conflict, which can result in an unhappy customer, a frustrated service provider and lost business. Therefore, the focus of this study was to analyze the effect of intercultural sensitivity on tourism employee performance in cross-cultural service encounters in three similar, but distinct service-dependent markets: the Hawaiian Islands, Greater London (UK) and the state of Florida. The results indicate that tourism employees with high intercultural sensitivity generally scored significantly (p < 0.05) higher than employees with low intercultural sensitivity in terms of service attentiveness, revenue contribution, interpersonal skills, job satisfaction and social satisfaction as they relate to cross-cultural encounters. There was no significant difference in results for motivation to work, tenure (years at present organization) and primary rewards (compensation, recognition, etc.). Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Extra-Role Customer Service: The Roles of Leader–Member Exchange (LMX), Affective Commitment,and Psychological Empowerment

ABSTRACT

Based on the social exchange and job characteristic theories, this study advances a moderated-mediation model that tries to explain the social-psychological processes connecting the leader–member exchange (LMX) and extra-role customer service, and examined it by collecting data from employees and managers employed in tourist hotels operating in Uttarakhand, India. A hierarchical regression analysis determined that LMX was positively related to extra-role customer service where affective commitment mediated this relationship. Further, an analysis of a moderated-mediation path revealed that psychological empowerment strengthened the direct influences of LMX on affective commitment and its indirect influence on extra-role customer service. Based on these findings, important theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.     

High-performance work practices and hotel employee performance: The mediation of work engagement

This study proposes and tests a research model that investigates whether work engagement functions as a mediator of the effects of high-performance work practices (HPWPs) on job performance and extra-role customer service. These relationships were assessed through LISREL 8.30 using structural equation modeling (SEM). Data were obtained from full-time frontline hotel employees and their managers in the Poiana Brasov region in Romania. The results suggest that work engagement acts as a full mediator of the effects of HPWPs on job performance and extra-role customer service. Specifically, HPWPs, as manifested by frontline employees’ appraisal of training, empowerment, and rewards, enhance work engagement. Such HPWPs in turn trigger job performance and extra-role customer service. Implications of the results are discussed and avenues for future research are offered.     

The impact of personal and functional aspects of restaurant employee service behaviour on customer satisfaction

Employee behaviour plays a significant role in satisfying restaurant customers, however, there is a paucity of research highlighted personal and functional aspects of employee behaviour and their influence on customer satisfaction. Accordingly, this study aims to bring a deeper insight of the impact of restaurant employee service behaviour on customer satisfaction. Using survey approach, the current study collected data from 212 tourists who had a dining experience in Jordan. The results of data analysis showed that both functional and personal aspects of service behaviour where able to explain customer satisfaction, with higher contribution of personal aspects over the functional ones. Depending on study’s findings, some implications were suggested including a recommendation to foodservice managers to adopt reinforcement programs that improve functional and personal aspects of their employees. A further recommendation was proposed to marketers, to give a higher attention to personal aspects of foodservices in their marketing activities.     

酒店组织公平性氛围和服务氛围与旅客的投诉次数

文章对57家酒店的167个服务团队进行了一次实证研究,探讨酒店的组织公平性氛围和服务氛围与旅客的投诉次数之间的关系。数据分析结果表明,酒店的组织公平性氛围与服务氛围存在显著的正相关关系,酒店的服务氛围与团队的服务质量存在显著的正相关关系,团队的服务质量与旅客的投诉次数存在显著的负相关关系,酒店的服务氛围中介了组织公平性氛围与团队服务质量之间的正相关关系;团队的服务质量是酒店的服务氛围与旅客投诉次数之间的中介变量。     

How to fuel employees’ prosocial behavior in the hotel service encounter

With mounting customer expectation for excellent service, frontline service employees’ prosocial service behavior is of great importance since it helps enhance customers’ perceived service quality, which is critical for maintaining a hotel’s competitive advantage relative to its comp set. Regardless of the importance of prosocial service behavior, role clarity, perceived organizational support, and psychological empowerment in encouraging employees’ prosocial service behavior has not received much attention. This study examines the effects of the above three predictors on the prosocial service behavior of customer-contact employees. The authors developed a conceptual model of prosocial service behavior and empirically tested it using structural equation modeling. The findings suggest that role clarity and psychological empowerment have a direct influence on prosocial service behavior. Psychological empowerment partially mediates the relationship between role clarity and prosocial service behavior and fully mediates the relationship between perceived organizational support and prosocial service behavior.