We developed and tested a cross-level model of the antecedents and outcomes of proactive customer service performance. Results from a field study of 900 frontline service employees and their supervisors in 74 establishments of a multinational hotel chain located in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia demonstrated measurement equivalence and suggested that, after controlling for service climate, initiative climate at the establishment level and general self-efficacy at the individual level predicted employee proactive customer service performance and interacted in a synergistic way. Results also showed that at the establishment level, controlling for service climate and collective general service performance, initiative climate was positively and indirectly associated with customer service satisfaction through the mediation of aggregated proactive customer service performance. We discuss important theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

In this research we examined the impact of empowering leadership behaviors (ELBs), psychological empowerment, and individual-level power values on a broad range of employee behaviors. Drawing on self-determination theory (Gagné and Deci, 2005), we hypothesized that ELBs would have direct effects on in-role and affiliative extra-role behaviors, but that the impact of ELBs on challenging extra-role behaviors would be mediated by psychological empowerment. Further, we hypothesized that individual-level power values (Schwartz, 1992) would moderate the mediated effect of ELBs on challenging behaviors. Responses to questionnaires from 541 employees and their supervisors were obtained from 16 hotel properties located in 11 Middle Eastern and Asian countries. Results supported our hypotheses of direct and mediated effects of ELBs on employee behaviors, and supported moderated mediation involving psychological empowerment and power values such that psychological empowerment was more strongly related to challenging behaviors for individuals low in power values.Empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that empowerment can have a significant impact on a broad range of important outcomes in many organizational contexts. Empowerment is associated with job satisfaction (Sparrowe, 1994;Spreitzer et al., 1997), managerial effectiveness (Spreitzer et al., 1997), creativity (Zhang and Bartol, in press), and team performance Kirkman and Rosen, 1999;Kirkman et al., 2004) and negatively related to strain (Spreitzer et al., 1997) and turnover intentions (Sparrowe, 1994). Moreover, in a recent large-scale longitudinal study, Birdi et al. (2008) found that empowerment was the strongest predictor of organizational productivity among the seven management practices examined.Researchers have approached the notion of empowerment from a variety of theoretical perspectives (Leach et al., 2003;Menon, 2001). One approach conceptualizes empowerment as a set of practices or managerial techniques in which empowering leadership behaviors play a central role (Arnold et al., 2000;Conger and Kanungo, 1988;Manz and Sims, 1987). A second approach focuses on psychological empowerment as a cognitive motivational state reflecting individuals' psychological reactions to empowering techniques and leadership behaviors (Spreitzer, 1995;Thomas and Velthouse, 1990).Psychological empowerment has been depicted as 'a consequence and necessary adjunct to situational empowerment' (Leach et al., 2003: 28). However, very little research has attempted to investigate empowering leadership and psychological empowerment in conjunction (Zhang and Bartol, in press, is an exception), and the notion that empowering leadership behaviors can be effective only insofar as they lead to increased psychological empowerment has never been explicitly tested. Indeed, although recent research on empowerment has examined very different behavioral outcomes, at least one study shows an effect of empowering leader behaviors that is not mediated by psychological empowerment (e.g. Ahearne et al....

Building upon and extending Parker, Bindl, and Strauss's (2010) theory of proactive motivation, we develop an integrated, multilevel model to examine how contextual factors shape employees' proactive motivational states and, through these proactive motivational states, influence their personal initiative behavior. Using data from a sample of hotels collected from 3 sources and over 2 time periods, we show that establishment-level initiative-enhancing human resource management (HRM) systems were positively related to departmental initiative climate, which was positively related to employee personal initiative through employee role-breadth self-efficacy. Further, department-level empowering leadership was positively related to initiative climate only when initiative-enhancing HRM systems were low. These findings offer interesting implications for research on personal initiative and for the management of employee proactivity in organizations. (PsycINFO Database Record

Employee empowerment is widely viewed as a promising approach to improve operating efficiency and customer service. But the most effective way to empower the staff is not always clear to hospitality managers, both in terms of what to do and what to avoid. Using data from 640 frontline service employees and their supervisors working in sixteen different properties of a multinational hotel chain in the Middle East and the Asia Pacific region, this study tested a model of the relationships between empowering leadership, psychological empowerment, organizational commitment, and voice behavior. Results suggest that psychological empowerment mediates the relationship between empowering leadership and both organizational commitment and voice behavior (defined as identifying problems and suggesting improvements). The study also found a particular pitfall for empowerment in high power distance cultures, in that the effects are much weaker for high power distance cultures. As the value of empowering leadership seems clear, multinational companies may wish to select employees and managers who are comfortable with an empowerment strategy, and make clear to all employees—particularly those on the frontline—that the organization will support them as they take more initiative.

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