ABSTRACT
A review of accounts of the applications of empowerment in service organizations reveals that the term covers a wide array of initiatives that are likely to represent different experiences and benefits to both employers and employees. Clearly, empowering employees to ‘take responsibility for the service encounter’ (Corsun and Enz, 1999), setting quality circles in the Accor Group, and organizing autonomous work team in Harvester Restaurants (Ashness and Lashley, 1995) may all be described as empowering employees but they ask different things of employees and clearly serve different expectations of employers.
