Employee Empowerment in the European Hotel Industry. Meaning, Process and Cultural Relativity

Citation

Chebat, J. (2003), "Employee Empowerment in the European Hotel Industry. Meaning, Process and Cultural Relativity", International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 245-248. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijsim.2003.14.2.245.1

The book reviewed here is the fruit of a doctorate dissertation at Tilburg University by Antonis K. Klidas on the effects of culture on the practice of empowerment in the European hotel industry. Empowerment has become a fashionable research area in the field of services marketing. Although this typically belongs to human resources researchers, it has definitely important marketing implications, which reflects the complex boundary spanning roles of contact services employees.

Empowerment has also been fashionable because it was considered as a way to cope with the drastic downsizing of firms in the early 1990s. The middle management paid a heavy price for the re‐structuring of companies where the financial considerations overshadowed most of other managerial considerations. Consequently, contact employees could no longer refer themselves to the authority of the middle management, which vanished; they had to be trained to make decisions by themselves. Were they prepared for such a drastic shift? In particular, empowerment is regarded as a strategic advantage in situations of service failures: empowered contact employees can provide the complaining customers with adequate and fast service recovery than non‐empowered counterparts.

The present book introduces us to an important and so far, little explored dimension of empowerment, that of culture: in the heterogeneous cultural environment of Europe, are some specific cultures more prone to develop empowered employees? This is all the more important since the market environment is extremely diversified: in the hotel industry studied here, contact employees have to deal with a great variety of customers coming from various cultural horizons. Since empowerment is related to the concept of adaptive behavior, in the hotel industry, contact employees have to adapt their behavior to a number of different cultures, which makes the book orientation all the more relevant.

The book contains a remarkably precise, detailed and well‐articulated review of the existing literature on several aspects of empowerment. Klidas made the review both easy (even pleasant) to read and scholarly competent. It covers a wide range of fields and correctly points out why the topic is important and its theoretical tenets. A couple of remarks however: the emphasis on the concept of emotional labor is not up to what it should be; also, in the same line, the concept of “commedia dell'arte” is put aside. I will explain: empowered employees in commercial services organizations have to undergo tremendous pressure to adapt their behavior to specific individual customers, especially in both the leisure and business hotel industry; consequently, since there are no fixed norms of how they should behave, the emotional labor is all the more important; also, empowered employees do not follow theatrical scripts; they rather invent their lines and follow a behavior typical of “commedia dell'arte” actors who have a general idea of what to do an what to say but mostly depend on their own creativity. Services tend to be considered as part of “experience economy”, as coined by Pine and Gilmore (1999), which is especially justified in the leisure industry. Klidas could have shown how empowerment and culture affect the “commedia dell'arte” on the stage of their industry. This being put aside, Klidas offers the readers an exceptional view over the literature on the psychological and managerial facets of empowerment.

Klidas draws his conceptualization of culture from the works of Hofstede, a psychologist who carried out an international survey among the employees in IBM subsidiaries in 72 countries. The purpose of the study was not academic. Hofstede was able to observe clear patterns of values related to the various countries studied. Four dimensions emerged from his analyses: power distance, individualism, masculinity and uncertainty avoidance. Klidas aims at understanding if these cultural dimensions are related to the practice of empowerment through the European Union countries he studied.

Klidas empirically shows that the most important factor in the development of empowered behavior is the delegation of authority. In other words, employees take initiatives as long as they perceive they have the authority to do so. It is not sufficient to simply “delineate reasonable limits” around employees’ authority: these limits have to be formally explicated and agreed upon. Role ambiguity is definitely a key‐mediating factor (as shown in revious studies such as Hartline and Ferrell (1996)), since it is affected by empowerment and conversely it affects adaptability to customers’ demands. Similarly, as Klidas shows, the more empowered the employees perceive they are, the more information they share with fellow employees, which in turn has significant impact on the organization's ability to learn from the market. In other words, empowerment contributes to make the firm a learning system.

Contrary to common sense expectations, training is found not to have significant effects of empowered behavior. Similarly, performance‐related rewards and openness of communication do not affect the empowered behavior, which finding is attributed by Klidas to the absence of systematic rewarding process. It could have attributed to another cause which is unexplored here: successful empowered employees may be organizational mavericks who do not follow the rules; they reinvent their own processes and recipes for success, not because of extrinsic rewards, not because they have been taught to do so, but because it reflects their own personal experience. Successful empowered employees are also found by Klidas to be of university education, which, we believe, confirms that such employees are somewhat marginal. More precisely, in organizations where such behaviors are not yet the norm, empowered employees are likely to originate from social milieus where these behaviors are intrinsically rewarded.

The main zest of the study stems from the cultural dimensions of the study. Klidas shows a south‐north cultural polarization: European northern countries significantly differ from the southern counterparts in terms of delegation of authority, sharing of information, openness of communication, training, selection‐recruitment and customer‐oriented culture. In brief, the exercise of empowered behavior is more extensive in the north than in the south. Employees in the south feel that they received a lower delegation of authority. Klidas points out very pertinently that this is reinforced by the fact that the information provided by managers regarding the delegation of authority from managers to frontline employees. In Italy, the delegation of authority largely depends on union agreements, which means “the absence of delegation (of authority) is institutionalized” (p. 221). In northern countries, on the contrary, managers delegate “an increased degree of authority to employees”.

Similarly, while in the north managers try to facilitate upward communication (including intranet), in the south, employees perceive that the communication is less open and that the managers are less willing to share information. In the north, training is perceived as more adapted to master routine and non‐routine tasks, more formalized and intensive. Klidas explains these findings with labor market considerations: since in the north the labor turnover is higher, it is all the more necessary to invest in training; similarly, it is also worth investing in selection and recruitment to attract the best candidates. This creates some confusion about the real contribution of culture to the empowered behavior of frontline employees: since, as Klidas stresses, “the general legislative framework seems to hinder employee empowerment both directly and indirectly” (p. 187) and since the labor market happens to be also somewhat different in the north and in the south, what is really left for culture as an explanation for empowered behavior?

Klidas corrects this impression by pointing out that, once a number of potential influences that may account for the north‐south discrepancies were controlled for (i.e. industry and organizational culture, technology, hotel size segment and market), cultural differences are the most plausible explanations. (However, these covariates he considers here do not include the “legislative framework” and the labor market). More precisely, two major aspects of the culture appear to explain the findings: the power distance and the uncertainty avoidance. These findings are extremely interesting since they pinpoint which dimensions of culture specifically hinder the implementation of empowerment.

In sum, this study is extremely interesting and managerially important. It reads well and shows a high degree of research competence.