Empowerment in five‐star hotels: choice, voice or rhetoric?

Abstract

This article highlights the ambiguities and debates surrounding the meaning, application, purpose and concomitants of the concept of empowerment presented in the service management literature and argues that these flow from the attempt to reconcile the need for control to secure employee compliance with the need to cede a degree of autonomy to secure co‐operation and initiative. It shows how empowerment is conceived primarily in terms of “choice” ‐ increase discretion over how work if performed ‐ rather than “voice” ‐ greater involvement in organizational decision‐making ‐ and is increasingly regarded as a particular and contingent management strategy in which control via regulation and supervision is replaced by more indirect controls. A study of five‐star hotels in Amsterdam is reported which shows that, despite managerial rhetoric, there was little “empowerment” in practice and what there was amounted to increased employee responsibility rather than greater choice over how work was done or more voice in organizational decisions and that supporting forms of recruitment, training and remuneration were mostly absent.