The Impact of Empowerment on Customer Contact Employees’ Roles in Service Organizations

Abstract

A pilot study was conducted to test a hierarchical model in which empowerment of contact personnel is presented as an antecedent condition to role conflict, role ambiguity, adaptability, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction. The latter are, in turn, presented as antecedents to helping behaviors directed at customers. The model is structured on three interfaces: employee-manager, employee-role, and employee-customer. The data were collected in six branches of the same bank in a major North American city. Results reveal that empowerment is a very efficacious managerial control tool in that it significantly affects the behavior and attitudinal dispositions of boundary-spanning service employees. Specifically, role ambiguity emerges as the most influential variable in the employee-role interface, and employee adaptability is a highly determining factor for the delivery of effective role-prescribed and extra-role performances. Implications for the management of customer-contact service employees and directions for further research are discussed.