The Empowerment Process: Integrating Theory and Practice

The Influence of Employee Empowerment on Employee Job Satisfaction in Five-Star Hotels in Jordan

“…It defined in a general definition as a collection of practices that consists of information sharing, employee autonomy, and delegation of authority (Randolph, 1995(Randolph, , 2000Blanchard et al, 1999). Empowerment is seen by other scholars (e.g, Conger and Kanungo, 1988;Thomas and Velthouse, 1990;Zimmerman, 1990) as intrinsic task motivation, or as the process of decentralizing decision-making in an organisation (Brymer, 1991). However, most scholars agree that the key element of empowerment involves giving employee freehand on certain activities with the full responsibilities that come with it (Sashkin, 1984;Conger and Kanungo, 1988;Schlessinger and Heskett, 1991;Bowen and Lawler, 1992).Thus, empowerment was focus on empowering management practices (Mainiero, 1986;Bowen and Lawler, 1992) as a set of procedures and that involves empowering workers (Conger and Kanungo, 1988), and that requires eliminating the levels of hierarchy to get less direct supervision (Randolph, 1995).…”

“…Conger and Kanungo, 1988;Thomas and Velthouse, 1990;Spreitzer, 1992Spreitzer, , 1995Zimmerman, 1995). Scholars realised the need to distinguish between employees" feelings or perceptions of empowerment and management practices designed to empower employees (Thomas and Velthouse, 1990).…”

“…The application of empowerment in the service industry provides employees with different experiences and benefits (Lashley, 2001) that include fostering employees feelings of self-efficacy in highly confidence ways (Conger and Kanungo, 1988;Conger, 1989), providing employees with the necessary discretion and autonomy to produce successful service in general and to achieve customer satisfaction in particular (Bowen and Lawler, 1992;Ford and Fottler, 1995;Lashley, 1995) and this subsequently increases the success of organisation as a main concern by employees (Spreitzer, 1995). Thus, empowered employees in the hospitality industry are more committed to improving service quality (Lashley, 1995).…”

“…Structural empowerment can be defined as a management technique which involves the sharing and delegation of authority between managers and their employees (Kanter, 1983;Conger and Kanungo, 1988), and therefore employees and managers solving problems and taking decisions (Ginnodo, 1997). It is also defined as an organisational practice and structure that devolves power through information, knowledge, resources, skills development, support and responsibility (Eylon and Bamberger, 2000).…”

Transformational leaders and work performance: the mediating roles of identification and self-efficacy

“…Therefore, it is assumed that the greater an individual's self-efficacy is in relation to a certain activity, the greater will be his/her involvement and persistence in achieving it. Bandura (1986) Conger and Kanungo (1988a) refer to the process by which individuals' perceptions of their self-efficacy are intensified as empowerment. Articulating the importance of the work one has done, stimulating participation in decision processes, and inspiring confidence that performance will be high are leadership behaviors associated with transformational perspectives that have been connected with psychological empowerment (e.g.…”