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Empowering service workers has acquired almost a born again religious fervor. Tom Peters calls it purposeful chaos. Robert Waterman dubs it directed autonomy. It has also been called the art of improvisation. Yet in the mid-1970s, the production-line approach to service was the darling child of service gurus. They advocated facing the customer with standardized, procedurally driven operations. Should we now abandon this approach in favor of empowerment? Unfortunately, there is no simple, clear-cut answer. In this article we try to help managers think about the question of whether to empower by clarifying its advantages and disadvantages, describing three forms that empower employees to different degrees, and presenting five contingencies that managers can use to determine which approach best fits their situation. We do not intend to debunk empowerment, rather we hope to clarify why to empower (there are costs, as well as benefits), how to empower (there are alternatives), and when to empower (it really does depend on the situation).
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Manufacturing thinks technocratically, and that explains its success. . . . By contrast, service looks for solutions in the performer of the task. This is the paralyzing legacy of our inherited attitudes: the solution to improved service is viewed as being dependent on improvements in the skills and attitudes of the performers of that service.
While it may pain and offend us to say so, thinking in humanistic rather than technocratic terms ensures that the service sector will be forever inefficient and that our satisfactions will be forever marginal. 2
He recommended (1) simplification of tasks, (2) clear division of labor, (3) substitution of equipment and systems for employees, and (4) little decision-making discretion afforded to employees. In short, management designs the system, and employees execute it. McDonalds is a good example. Workers are taught how to greet customers and ask for their order, including a script for suggesting additional items. They learn a set procedure for assembling the order (for example, cold drinks first, then hot ones), placing items on the tray, and placing the tray where customers need not reach for it. There is a script and a procedure for collecting money and giving change. Finally, there is a script for saying thank you and asking the customer to come again. 3 This production-line approach makes customer-service interactions uniform and gives the organization control over them. It is easily learned; workers can be quickly trained and put to work. What are the gains from a production-line approach? Efficient, low-cost, high-volume service operations, with satisfied customers.
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It is necessary to dehumiliate work by eliminating the policies and procedures (almost always tiny) of the organization that demean and belittle human dignity. It is impossible to get peoples best efforts, involvement, and caring concern for things you believe important to your customers and the long-term interests of your organization when we write policies and procedures that treat them like thieves and bandits. 5
To free someone from rigorous control by instructions, policies, and orders, and to give that person freedom to take responsibility for his ideas, decisions, and actions is to release hidden resources that would otherwise remain inaccessible to both the individual and the organization. 6
In contrast to the industrialization of service, empowerment very much looks to the performer of the tasks for solutions to service problems. Workers are asked to suggest new services and products and to solve problems creatively and effectively. What, then, does it really mean beyond the catchy slogans to empower employees? We define empowerment as sharing with frontline employees four organizational ingredients: (1) information about the organizations performance, (2) rewards based on the organizations performance, (3) knowledge that enables employees to understand and contribute to organizational performance, and (4) power to make decisions that influence organizational direction and performance. We will say more about these features later. For now, we can say that with a production-line approach, these features tend to be concentrated in the hands of senior management; with an empowerment approach, they tend to be moved downward to frontline employees.
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Federal Express and UPS present two different faces to the customer, and behind these faces are different management philosophies and organizational cultures. Federal Express is a high-involvement, horizontally coordinated organization that encourages employees to use their judgment above and beyond the rulebook. UPS is a top-down, traditionally controlled organization, in which employees are directed by policies and procedures based on industrial engineering studies of how all service delivery aspects should be carried out and how long they should take. Similarly, at Disney theme parks, ride operators are thoroughly scripted on what to say to guests, including a list of preapproved ad libs! At Club Med, however, CEO Jacques Giraud fervently believes that guests must experience real magic, and the resorts GOs (gentils organisateurs, congenial hosts) are set free to spontaneously create this feeling for their guests. Which is the better approach? Federal Express or UPS? Club Med or Disney? At a recent executive education seminar on customer service, one of us asked, Who thinks that it is important for their business to empower their service personnel as a tool for improving customer service? All twenty-seven participants enthusiastically raised their hands. Although they represented diverse services banking, travel, utilities, airlines, and shipping and they disagreed on most points, they all agreed that empowerment is key to customer satisfaction. But is it?
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Customer service involves both delivering the service, such as checking a guest into a hotel room, and recovering from poor service, such as relocating him from a smoking floor to the nonsmoking room he originally requested. Although delivering good service may mean different things to different customers, all customers feel that service businesses ought to fix things when service is delivered improperly. Figure 1 (http://sloanreview.mit.edu/files/2008/12/3333-ex1-lo11.png) depicts the relationships among service delivery, recovery, and customer satisfaction. Fixing something after doing it wrong the first time can turn a dissatisfied customer into a satisfied, even loyal, customer. But service businesses frequently fail in the act of recovery because service employees are not empowered to make the necessary amends with customers. Instead, customers hear employees saying, Gee, I wish there was something I could do, but I cant, Its not my fault, or I could check with my boss, but shes not here today. These employees lack the power and knowledge to recover, and customers remain dissatisfied.
Employees Will Interact with Customers with More Warmth and Enthusiasm.
Research now supports our long-standing intuition that customers perceptions of service quality are shaped by the courtesy; empathy; and responsiveness of service employees. 7 Customers want employees to appear concerned about their needs. Can empowerment help create this? One of us has done customer service research in branch banks that showed that when the tellers reported feeling good about how they were supervised, trained, and rewarded, customers thought more highly of the service they received. 8 In short, when employees felt that management was looking after their needs, they took better care of the customer. In service encounters, employees feelings about their jobs will spill over to affect how customers feel about the service they get. This is particularly important when employee attitudes are a key part of the service package. In banking, where the customer receives no tangible benefits in the exchange other than a savings deposit slip, a sour teller can really blemish a customers feelings about the encounter.
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Giving frontline employees a voice in how we do things around here can lead to improved service delivery and ideas for new services. The bank study showed that the tellers could accurately report how customers viewed overall service quality and how they saw the branches service climate (e.g., adequacy of staff and appearance of facilities). 9 Frontline employees are often ready and willing to offer their opinion. When it comes to market research, imagine the difference in response rates from surveying your employees and surveying your customers.
The Costs
What are the costs of empowerment?
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values. This training would probably be unsuccessful, and the employees wouldnt be around long enough to provide a return on the investment. Alternatively, the organization could pay higher wages to full-time, permanent employees, but they would be idle when business was slow.
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Suggestion Involvement
Suggestion Involvement represents a small shift away from the control model. Employees are encouraged to contribute ideas through formal suggestion programs or quality circles, but their day-to-day work activities do not really change. Also, they are only empowered to recommend; management typically retains the power to decide whether or not to implement. Suggestion involvement can produce some empowerment without altering the basic production-line approach. McDonalds, for example, listens closely to the front line. The Big Mac, Egg McMuffin, and McDLT all were invented by employees, as was the system of wrapping burgers that avoids leaving a thumbprint in the bun. As another example, Florida Power and Light, which won the Deming quality award, defines empowerment in suggestion involvement terms.
Job Involvement
Job Involvement represents a significant departure from the control model because of its dramatic opening up of job content. Jobs are redesigned so that employees use a variety of skills. Employees believe their tasks are significant, they have considerable freedom in deciding how to do the work, they get more feedback, and they handle a whole, identifiable piece of work. Research shows that many employees find enriched work more motivating and satisfying, and they do higher-quality work. 14 Often job involvement is accomplished through extensive use of teams. Teams are often appropriate in complex service organizations such as hospitals and airlines because individuals cannot offer a whole service or handle a customer from beginning to end of service delivery. Teams can empower back-office workers in banks and insurance companies as well. Employees in this environment require training to deal with the added complexity. Supervisors, who now have fewer shots to call, need to be reoriented toward supporting the front line, rather than directing it. Despite the heightened level of empowerment it brings, the job involvement approach does not change higher-level strategic decisions concerning organization structure, power, and the allocation of rewards. These remain the responsibility of senior management.
High-Involvement
High-Involvement organizations give their lowest-level employees a sense of involvement not just in how they do their jobs or how effectively their group performs, but in the total organizations performance. Virtually every aspect of the organization is different from that of a control-oriented organization. Business performance information is shared. Employees develop skills in teamwork, problem solving, and business operations. They participate in work-unit management decisions. There is profit sharing and employee ownership.
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High-involvement designs may be expensive to implement. Perhaps most troublesome is that these management techniques are relatively undeveloped and untested. People Express tried to operate as a highinvolvement airline, and the ongoing struggle to learn and develop this new organizational design contributed to its operating problems. Today, America West is trying to make the high-involvement design work. New hires spend 25 percent of their first years salary on company stock. All employees receive annual stock options. Flight attendants and pilots develop their own work procedures and schedules. Employees are extensively cross-trained to work where they are needed. Only time will tell if America West can make high-involvement work as it struggles with its financial crisis stemming from high fuel costs and rapid growth. Federal Express displays many high-involvement features. A couple of years ago, it began a companywide push to convert to teams, including the back office. It organized its 1,000 clerical workers in Memphis into superteams of five to ten people and gave them the authority and training to manage themselves. These teams helped the company cut customer service problems, such as incorrect bills and lost packages, by 13 percent in 1989.
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Proposition 2: The higher the total score from all five contingencies, the better the fit with an empowerment approach; the lower the total score, the better the fit with a production-line approach. A production-line approach is a good fit with situations that score in the range of 5 to 10. For empowerment approaches, suggestion involvement is a good fit with situations that score in the range of 11 to 15, job involvement with scores that range from 16 to 20, and high involvement with scores that range from 21 to 25. Proposition 3: The higher the total score, the more the benefits of increasing empowerment will outweigh the costs. In what follows, we describe each contingencys implications for a production-line or empowerment approach.
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Technology.
It is very difficult to build challenge, feedback, and autonomy into a telephone operators job, given the way the delivery technology has been designed. The same is true of many fast-food operations. In these situations, the technology limits empowerment to only suggestion involvement and ultimately may almost completely remove individuals from the service delivery process, as has happened with ATMs. When technology constrains empowerment, service managers can still support frontline employees in ways that enhance their satisfaction and the service quality they provide. For example, managers can show employees how much their jobs matter to the organizations success and express more appreciation for the work they do. In other words, managers can do a better job of making the old management model work! Routine work can be engaging if employees are convinced that it matters. Volunteers will spend hours licking envelopes in a fundraising campaign for their favorite charity. Disney theme park employees do an admirable job of performing repetitive work, partly because they believe in the values, mission, and show business magic of Disney.
Business Environment.
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Businesses that operate in unpredictable environments benefit from empowerment. Airlines face many challenges to their operations: bad weather, mechanical breakdowns, and competitors actions. They serve passengers who make a wide variety of special requests. It is simply impossible to anticipate many of the situations that will arise and to program employees to respond to them. Employees trained in purposeful chaos are appropriate for unpredictable environments. Fast-food restaurants, however, operate in stable environments. Operations are fairly fail-safe; customer expectations are simple and predictable. In this environment, the service business can use a production-line approach. The stability allows, even encourages, management with policies and procedures, because managers can predict most events and identify the best responses.
Types of People.
Empowerment and production-line approaches demand different types of managers and employees. For empowerment to work, particularly in the high-involvement form, the company needs to have Theory Y managers who believe that their employees can act independently to benefit both the organization and its customers. If the management ranks are filled with Theory X types who believe that employees only do their best work when closely supervised, then the production-line approach may be the only feasible option unless the organization changes its managers. Good service can still be the outcome. For example, most industry observers would agree that Delta and American Airlines are managed with a control orientation rather than a strong empowerment approach. Employees will respond positively to empowerment only if they have strong needs to grow and to deepen and test their abilities at work. Again, a checkered history of job enrichment efforts has taught us not to assume that everyone wants more autonomy, challenge, and responsibility at work. Some employees simply prefer a production-line approach. Lastly, empowerment that involves teamwork requires employees who are interested in meeting their social and affiliative needs at work. It also requires that employees have good interpersonal and group process skills.
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productivity can more clearly show profitability than can measures of customer perceptions of service quality. However, these differences are now blurring as service competition increases and service companies become more sophisticated in tracking the benefits of customer service quality: As service businesses consider empowerment, they can look at high-involvement manufacturing organizations as labs in which the various empowerment approaches have been tested and developed. Many lessons have been learned in manufacturing about how to best use quality circles, enriched jobs, and so on. And the added good news is that many service businesses are ideally suited to applying and refining these lessons. Multisite, relatively autonomous service operations afford their managers an opportunity to customize empowerment programs and then evaluate them. In summary, the newest approaches to managing the production line can serve as role models for many service businesses, but perhaps not all. Before service organizations rush into empowerment programs, they need to determine whether and how empowerment fits their situation.
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REFERENCES (19) 1. T. Levitt, Production-Line Approach to Service, Harvard Business Review, SeptemberOctober 1972, pp. 4152; and
T. Levitt, Industrialization of Service, Harvard Business Review, SeptemberOctober 1976, pp. 6374 2. 3. Levitt (1972). D. Tansik, Managing Human Resource Issues for High-Contact Service Personnel, in Service Management Effectiveness, eds. D. Bowen, R. Chase, and
T. Cummings (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990). 4. 5. 6. 7. R. Zemke and D. Schaaf, The Service Edge: 101 Companies That Profit from Customer Care (New York: New American Library, 1989), p.68. As quoted in Zemke and Schaaf (1989), p. 68. J. Carlzon, Moments of Truth (New York: Ballinger, 1987). V. Zeithaml, A. Parasuraman, and L.L. Berry, Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations (New York: The Free Press,
1990). See also: B. Schneider and D. Bowen, Employee and Customer Perceptions of Service in Banks: Replication and Extension, Journal of Applied Psychology 70 (1985): 423433. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. Schneider and Bowen (1985). Ibid. Zeithaml, Parasuraman, and Berry (1990). C. Goodwin and I. Ross, Consumer Evaluations of Responses to Complaints: What's Fair and Why, Journal of Services Marketing 4 (1990): 5361. See E.E. Lawler III, High-Involvement Management (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1986). See E.E. Lawler III, Choosing an Involvement Strategy, Academy of Management Executive 2 (1988): 197204. See for example J.R. Hackman and G.R. Oldham, Work Redesign (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1980). Ibid. R.J. Sutton and A. Rafaeli, Untangling the Relationship between Displayed Emotions and Organizational Sales: The Case of Convenience Stores,
Academy of Management Journal 31 (1988): 461487 17. E.E. Lawler III, G.E. Ledford, Jr., and S.A. Mohrman, Employee Involvement in America: A Study of Contemporary Practice (Houston: American Productivity
ABOUT THE AUTHORS David E. Bowen is associate professor of management, business programs, Arizona State University, West.Edward E. Lawler III is director of the Center for Effective Organizations, Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Southern California.
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