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Organizational initiatives to strengthen customer orientation among front-line service workers abound, and have led many commentators to speak of the reconstitution of service work. These interventions rest on managers' assumptions about what engenders the desired customer-oriented behaviours among employees. We evaluate those assumptions in the context of a major change initiative in a supermarket firm. The logic of the programme mirrors key precepts in the contemporary management literature. These are that management behaviour, job design and values-based training can produce a sense of empowerment among employees, and that empowerment will generate prosocial customer-oriented behaviour. Using data from a large scale employee survey, we test the validity of those assumptions. Employees who perceived management behaviour in a positive light and who had participated in values-based training were more likely to feel empowered (i.e. to have internalized prosocial service values and to feel a sense of competence and autonomy on the job). Psychological empowerment was, in turn, positively related to the customer-oriented behaviour of workers. This study, therefore, provides support for key assumptions underlying HRM theory and practice in services. The 'sovereign customer' is seen to demand greater individual attention, flexibility and novelty in the provision of services, as well as goods (du Gay, 1996; Peters, 1987; Sturdy, 1998). Service quality has thus become a major management preoccupation. Increasing numbers of organizations, including those who continue to compete on price, seek also to differentiate themselves on the basis of superior customer service. A key problem for managers is how to ensure appropriate behaviours on the part of front-line workers: those employees who actually meet the customer and deliver the service (Bowen and Schneider, 1988; Carlzon, 1987).

This paper argues that the conception of management control as an employee resource can enhance critical understandings of front-line service work. The argument is developed first through a critique of the contemporary control literature and its prominent worker images of smiling docility and haggard exhaustion. Seeking to encourage accounts more sensitive to the subjectivity and agency of service workers, the paper calls for more research attention to the question of how these employees experience and evaluate management control in relation to their self-defined interests. Analysis of the nature of contemporary service work suggests that one such perceived interest is likely to be interactive control, or the capacity of workers to control and influence those parties with whom they directly interact. Based on a close reading of the emerging empirical literature on services, the article explores various ways in which the bureaucratic, technical and normative regulation designed by management to control service workers is used in turn by workers to further their own control and influence over managers and customers. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.

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