A Longitudinal Analysis of An Accelerating Effect of Empowerment on Job

Satisfaction: Customer-contact vs. Non-customer-contact workers

(Lee, Kim & Perdue, 2016)

Lee, G., Kim, P., & Perdue, R. (2016). A longitudinal analysis of an accelerating effect of
empowerment on job satisfaction: Customer-contact vs. non-customer-contact workers.
International Journal Of Hospitality Management, 57, 1-8. doi: 10.1016/j.ijhm.2016.05.006

✤ Background Knowledge
• First proposed:
- The concept of employee empowerment first appeared in the management literature in
1977 by Kanter.
• What is employee empowerment:
- The core element of empowerment is giving employees decision discretion or latitude over
job activities.
• Significances (Consequences) of employee empowerment: in general, is is considered to be an
effective management practice for desirable work outcomes:
- Stronger relationship with attitudinal consequences:
• Job satisfaction: employees are more likely to have a pleasurable or positive
emotional state with their job.
• Self-efficacy enhancement: it promotes employees’ self-efficacy as empowering
employees has a motivational impact on work outcomes since they tend to perceive
that they are entrusted with genuine responsibility for work process and outcomes.
• Management trustworthiness enhancement: it promotes employees’ trust in their
management as empowered employees tend to perceive empowerment as signaling
management’s willingness to nurture their career.
• Employee commitment enhancement: it promotes employees to devote
themselves to the organization.
- Can also positively impact behavioral consequences:
• Structural efficiency enhancement: it enhances structural efficiency by removing
unnecessary organizational layers.
• Task performance
• Contextual performance: activities that contribute to the social and psychological
core of the organization
• Customer satisfaction
• Antecedents of employee empowerment: although it is generally viewed as positively influential,
some argue that there are certain preconditions that influence the perception and consequence of
employee empowerment.
- Organizational characteristics (contextual factors): organizational characteristics
determine the degree to which an employee feels empowered, such as organizational
culture, management style and practices, leadership styles. [more significant]
 For example: a customer-oriented culture and management style enhance empowered
behaviors among employees.
- Individual factors: individual differences can also influences employees’ perception of
empowerment, such as gender, age, tenure etc.

✤ Purpose

• To examine whether the impact of empowerment on job satisfaction increases as time changes,
and whether this impact is stronger for customer-contact employees than non-customer-contact
employees.

✤ Background of the Article

• Importance of the topic:
- Since employee empowerment is widely referred to as a core element of high performance
work, researches on its antecedents and consequences have widely gained theoretical and
practical attentions.
• Current Research Gaps:
- Few attempts have been made to investigate whether the positive impact of empowerment
on employees’ responds is differently manifested by the nature of work.
- Few empirical studies have been made to examine the impacts of empowerment on job
satisfaction over time as the topic has been typically studies using cross-functional designs:
As most organizational perceptions of individuals or group norms change over time,
both empowerment and job satisfaction most likely to change over time as well, but
little is known concerning either how they change or how the effect of empowerment
on satisfaction changes.

✤ Objectives and Hypothesis

• Objective 1: to examine whether the impact of empowerment on job satisfaction is more salient
for customer-contact service work groups than for non-customer-contact work groups.
➡ Hypothesis 1: the positive effect of empowerment on job satisfaction is stronger for
customer-contact employee groups than for their non-customer-contact work counterparts.
- Particular importance of employee empowerment for customer-contact employees:
Customer-contact workers are often required to promptly provide diverse customers
with heterogeneous and high-quality services in different situations, where they often
need sufficient decision latitude to ensure the efficiency. Therefore, employee
empowerment is particularly important for them as it allows them to use more of their
own judgment in promptly dealing with customer service challenges.
• Objective 2: to investigate whether the effect of empowerment on job satisfaction increases or
decreases across time.
➡ Hypothesis 2: the impact of empowerment on job satisfaction increases over time.
- Tenure: more decision latitudes are expected for individuals with more tenure
 Explained by accountability theory: accountability refers to the extent to which an
individual’s contribution to a group is identifiable, while empowerment makes the
contributions of an individual to a group identifiable.
Junior: at or near the beginning of a term of employment, such
accountability might be viewed by an individual as being stressful
Senior: as time passes and the individual acclimates into the group, the stress
associated with such accountability would typically decreases, making
individuals more comfortable with decision-making authority .
Explained by career stages research: there are three distinctive career stages through
which employees progress as they become integrated into an organization, employees
at different career stages would have different expectations from their management.
Establishment - Advancement - Maintenance: employees in an early career
stage who are given less complex work tasks are less likely ob influence by
levels of job autonomy.
• Objective 3: to examine whether the impacts of empowerment on job satisfaction over time differ
between for customer-contact service work groups and for non-customer-contact service work
groups.
- Considering the theories of the previous two, the authors thereby propose:
➡ Hypothesis 3: the impacts of empowerment on job satisfaction over time is more salient for
customer-contact service work groups than for non-customer-contact service work groups.

Nature of work:
customer-contact or not

Employee Job
Empowerment Satisfaction

Time wave

✤ Methodology

• Brief description:
- Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM): this study employee a HLM technique to test
research hypotheses using a longitudinal dataset from an annual employee opinion
survey conducted by hospitality company in the U.S. for three consecutive years
• Sample and procedure:
- Sample: 67 work teams consisting of 1534 employees, namely, over 70% of the employees
in the firm participated in the survey for all three years.
- Survey handling:
• The survey was originally administered to individual employees
• The employees were divided into 67 departments
• The department-level average scores were used for research due to reasons related
to data confidentiality
 •
Each average score was weighted with the number of employees in the
corresponding department.
• Measurement of Job Satisfaction
- Four items anchored with (1) strongly disagree and (7) strongly disagree, proved to b
relevant and internal reliable (homogeneity):
• I am satisfied with my job
• I am satisfied with the kind of work I am currently doing
• I am satisfied with the level of challenge in my current job
• I look forward to coming to work

• Measurement of Employee Empowerment

- Four items anchored with (1) strongly disagree and (7) strongly disagree, proved to be
relevant and internal reliable (homogeneity):
• My supervisors give me the freedom I need to do my job well
• My supervisors trust me to use my judgment to solve problems
• My supervisor assigns me a job, but allows me to decide how I do it
• My supervisor encourages me to use my initiative to solve job problems

• Prove of the difference existence between customer-contact and non-customer-contact

- A T-test was conducted to examine whether here exists any difference in term of
employees’ service perception between the two types, and the results shows a statistically
significant difference.
• Customer-contact: F&B service, transportation service, ticketing service
• Non-customer-contact: maintenance, accounting, property management

• Analysis of Data
- HLM a technique of longitudinal multi-level analysis is used to construct the growth
curve models and to analyze the accelerating effects of empowerment and the cluster effect
of customer-contact or non-customer-contact groups on their job satisfaction over time.
• Non-customer-contact group was coded as 0
• Customer-contact group was coded as 1

Ytj(Job Satisfaction) = π0i + π︎1i (Time)ti + ︎π2i (Empowerment)ti +︎ π3i (Empowerment ∗ Time)ti + eti

π0i π︎1i π2i π3i

Coefficient of the
Level 1
Initial value of job Coefficient of interaction effect
Coefficient of time
satisfaction empowerment of time and
empowerment
π0i = ︎ β00 + β01 + γ0i π1i = ︎ β10 + β11 + γ1i π2i = ︎ β20 + β21 π3i = ︎ β30 + β31

β00 β01 γ0i β10 β11 γ1i β20 β21 β30 β31
The
interactio
The n effect
The The
Level 2 Intercept: interactio of
Random interactio Random interactio
grand The effect The effect n effect customer
effect of n effect effect of n effect
mean of of The effect of of contact
job of time job of
job customer of time empower empower and cross-
satisfactio and satisfactio empower
satisfactio contact ment ment and product
n customer n growth ment and
n customer of
contact time
contact empower
ment and
time
✤ Results (Main Findings)
• Preliminary analysis: based on simple descriptive analysis
Customer-contact group Non-customer group
Job satisfaction Empowerment Job satisfaction Empowerment
Time 0 4.79 5.42 4.75 5.22
Time 1 4.95 5.56 4.88 5.50
Time 2 5.00 5.71 5.35 5.55
- Both job satisfaction and empowerment of the two groups had similar initial scores
- Both job satisfaction and empowerment of the two groups showed similar growth pattern
• Customer-contact group indicated slightly higher growth of empowerment
• Non-customer-contact group indicated apparently higher job satisfaction growth
• Longitudinal analysis: based on HML model
- Baseline model: only the intercepts for the initial score and growth component (time) were
specified.
 • The mean of initial job satisfaction was 4.76 at time 0;
• The average growth rate over time was 0.19 for each year since time 0;
• Both random effects were significant, meaning that there were significant variations
among groups in terms of initial job satisfaction and growth rates of job satisfaction
over time.

- Conceptual model: the complete version of analysis

 • The initial average job satisfaction of customer-contact group is 4.71, being
identical to the average job satisfaction of non-customer-contact group, since
‘customer-contact was 0.16 points higher than non-customer-contact group’ was not
statistically significant with p>0.05.
• The average growth rate of job satisfaction over time for non-customer-contact
group is 0.31, the number for customer-contact group is 0.29 points lower.
• H1 Supported: the effect of employee empowerment on job satisfaction is more
salient for customer-contact employees than for non-customer-contact employees
—— β20 = 0.31 (p<0.01) means a significant positive effect of empowerment on job
satisfaction for non-customer-contact group, while β21 = 0.51 (p<0.01) means that
the customer-contact group indicated a 0.51 points higher effect of empowerment
on satisfaction than the non-customer-contact group.
• H2 Supported: the effect of empowerment accelerates over the years —— β30 =
0.35 (p<0.01) means the interaction effect of empowerment on job satisfaction
varied significantly over time at an average growth rate of 0.35.
• H3 Denied: the effect of empowerment on job satisfaction over time for customer-
contact service work groups is not significantly higher than than for non-customer-
contact service work groups —— β31 = 0.04 (p>0.05) means no significant trend
difference was found between the two groups. A possible explanation is that the
time-caring effect accounted for most of the variance, and thus it was too hard to
detect the moderating impact of work nature.

✤ Discussion and Implications

• Why important for hospitality:
- This research is particularly important for hospitality industry, because the core element of
the industry is about heterogeneous service encounters, that there are lots of customer-
contact workers being faced with the stress of unpredictable questions and disagreeable
customers. They need sufficient decision latitude to make reactions to the diverse situations
based on their judgment promptly. Managers in the industry should make use of the
findings of the research to implement appropriate empowerment practices.
• Managerial takeaways from the findings:
- Managers need to take the nature of job into consideration, empowering especially
employees who actually deliver customer service, designing induction and training
programs appropriate for customer-contact and non-customer-contact groups respectively.
- Managers need to take into career stages into consideration to implement long-term
empowerment strategies since the impact of empowerment on job satisfaction accelerates
as time passes:
• Be more generous to empower workers who are able to perform advanced tasks
(who have been in the positions for longer tenure), given that the experienced and
competent employees are likely to expect more decision latitudes and
accountability than their junior counterparts, and will feel more dissatisfied if the
decision latitude level has withheld or lessened.
• Be more prudent to empower junior employees, since allowing too much delegation
to workers at earlier employment stages might go over their experience and
competence, make them stressful, and lead to undesirable work outcomes to
Managers need to.
- Managers need to have long-term empowerment strategies for both customer-contact and
non-customer-contact employees since there was no significant difference found the
accelerates effects of empowerment on their job satisfaction over time, in another words,
regardless of the type of work, the time varying effects of empowerment on job satisfaction
exists.
• Contribution to theory
- Shows an alternative methodological approach of taking the nature of job into
consideration, which makes comparison between groups rather than using a particular type
of group.
- Contributes to the longitudinal effect of empowerment on job satisfaction over time while
the most previous studies examined the relationship using cross-sectional data only.
• Limitations and directions for future research
- Limited sample size: since a possible explanation for why there was no difference found
in the accelerating effects of empowerment on job satisfaction for the two groups is that the
time-caring effect accounted for most of the variance and thus it was too hard to detect the
moderating impact of work nature, a larger sale size is called for testing the third
hypothesis again.
- Lack of generalizability: the database was purely obtained from a hospitality company in
the U.S., which means the findings might be influenced by national culture, organizational
culture, industry nature and so on. Future studies need to be conducted in different work
settings.
- Lack of insights into various job facets: the study measured employee views to
empowerment as a whole, but the favorability of decision-making authority might vary
among different job facets. For example, employees might favor empowerment to solve
customer issues, but might be stressed out by being empowered to supervise co-workers.
Future study is needed to investigate the possible difference of empowerment effects on
different job activities.
- Investigated attribution bias: attrition bias was not investigated in this study since the
authors did not access to the individual results due to data confidentiality (attribution bias
is a cognitive bias that refers to the systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to
find reasons for their own and others' behaviors, they constantly make attributions
regarding the cause of their own and others’ behaviors, however, such attributions do not
always accurately mirror reality).
- Short time frame: the time span of the data in this study is only 3 years, longer time frame
should be used for future study to see the effect over longer time periods.