Employee empowerment in international tourist hotels in Taiwan: A cultural perspective.

Empowerment in the hospitality industry is often regarded as a means to improve service quality and customer satisfaction by involving frontline employees with a focus on the employee-guest encounter. Because of the notion of empowerment many international hotel chains companies try to adopt and implement empowerment and transfer empowerment management practice to their hotels worldwide. However empowerment theory has barely addressed the implications of applying empowerment in a cross-cultural context (Klidas, 2001). This thesis explores in what way and to what extent national cultural value orientations influence individual behaviours for empowerment policy and practice through cases studies of three international tourist hotels in Taiwan. The study's approach involved developing a conceptual framework of issues related to employee empowerment implementation. The investigation is based on the way that individual employees and managers give their personal views and experiences with regard to empowerment and look at the causes of any gaps between the empowerment rhetoric and practice. Relevant primary data was collected through semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The study adopted an inductive approach to evaluate the implication of the research's empirical findings to understand better national cultural value orientations influence individual behaviours. The results highlight the Taiwanese cultural value of group harmony orientation influence individual behaviour that may affect people's perception of relationship between managers and employees and how business should be operated challenging empowerment implementation. The contribution of this research is to our understanding of national cultural values have an impact on empowerment implementation and to the theory of the cultural relativity of empowerment.