| dc.description.abstract | With the economic growth and the enhancement of people’’s living levels, consumers pay much attention to the quality of goods and service rather than the price. The retail industry has put emphasis on service quality, positioned as service providers, and expected their members to continuously meet customers’ needs with high level of service quality.
Front-line workers play important roles in delivering service quality. Enterprises empower their employees, making them have more abilities to help customers solve their problems, improve their working attitude and efficiency, and in turn improve service behavior and organizational performance. However, empowerment is not a panacea. Enterprises should not limit empowerment to a top-down approach; rather, they should emphasize employees’ psychological empowerment. The goal of empowerment will be achieved only when empowerment is perceived by employees and influences their external behavior. Therefore, it is worthy to discuss if enterprises understand employees’ psychological empowerment and apply it to enhance service quality.
A retail service chain store was chosen as the subject. Under the background the organizational change, data in two periods were collected to explore if employees’ psychological empowerment influences service behavior; the change of the employees’ psychological empowerment and the difference of individual empowerment are also discussed to see if they will influence the change of service behavior in the period of the corporate revolution. According to these discussions, this study would like to further develop a model of influencing employees’ service behavior by the application of empowerment. The results of this study are listed as below:
1. The initial competency dimension of psychological empowerment has significantly positive effects on service behavior.
2. The initial meaning, self-determination and impact dimensions of psychological empowerment do not significantly influence service behavior.
3. The increase of competency, meaning and self-determination dimensions of psychological empowerment are positively related to the improvement of service behavior, but only the increase of competency has significant influences on the improvement of service behavior. The change of meaning and self-determination do not significantly influence the improvement of service behavior.
4. The increase of impact dimension does not significantly influence the change of service behavior.
To sum up, the results indicated that the initial psychological empowerment can predict service behavior and the raise of psychological empowerment can improve service behavior as well. Therefore, managers who facilitate empowerment should reinforce the communication with employees, information feedback, training and development, and organizational climate to improve employees’ psychological empowerment and service behavior.
Key Words: psychological empowerment, service behavior | en_US |