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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 therelationship between strategic decision speed and firm performance,and to better understand the forces thatimpact 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 studentsfrom 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 andwants. 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 professionalsurvey 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 theindividual 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-offquestionnaires. 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 Canadianemployees, 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: presentor 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 randomlyassigned 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 andrequest nature on intention to comply were significant. Subjects reported significantly greater intention tocomply 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 effectivenessquestionnaire-II, Spreitzers 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, whichimproves 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 thepersonnel 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 serviceenterprises. 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 tounderstand 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 objectiveof 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 empowermentat 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 theoreticalexplanations 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 isuseful 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 andbehavioral 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 theseconstructs 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 empowermentpractices reflect a mo tivational, energizing dynamic, while the beneficial role of behavioral control reflects a

competencedevelopment dynamic.

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