Culture Affects Power of Empowerment

"After two decades of research, empowerment is now widely accepted as a potent way to enhance job performance and satisfaction," according to a new set of cross-cultural studies. The authors define empowerment as "providing employees with discretion and autonomy in connection with their work." But, they write, there is growing awareness that empowerment is not equally effective in all cultures.

Three Hong Kong researchers used three different study methods to look into the issue:

• An analysis combining work-related measures from a massive worldwide survey done in the early 1990s (57,561 adults in 42 nations) with another survey of "power distance": the higher a culture's power distance, the more its people "believe that subordinates should play the role of taking instructions and orders from their supervisors."
• Surveys of front-line hotel workers in Beijing and Toronto directly measuring level of empowerment, power distance, and job satisfaction.
• Scenarios presented to university students majoring in hotel administration.

The results fit together like a puzzle and provided the first proof that cultural power distance affects whether job performance and satisfaction is improved by empowerment. In cultures that believe in power sharing, empowerment improved an individual's job satisfaction and (in two studies) desire to help customers. Although empowerment also helped somewhat among workers from power-distant cultures, the effect wasn't nearly as strong.

The researchers write, "…where unequal power distribution…is considered to be the norm, service employees may feel uneasy" and be reluctant to use the power given them. In that case, "Other management practices, such as building and maintaining authoritative but warm, trusting relationships with subordinates may prove…more effective…" They say, "for service employees whose job nature is simple and routine, tight service scripts and minimal discretionary power may be more desirable than empowerment for achieving high levels of marketing effectiveness and operational efficiency."

Source: Hui, M., K. Au, and H. Fock (04), "Empowerment Effects Across Cultures," Journal of International Business Studies 35:46.