works in organizations will build on managers’ external competen-
cies of knowledge, experience, expertise and judgement by concen-
trating on internal communication, which in turn will contribute to
an environment for empowerment, staff responsibility and
improved service performance.
The empowerment and involvement of
employees
The empowerment and involvement of staff to enable them to use
their discretion to deliver a better quality of service to their cus-
tomers is another key internal marketing activity. This is a radical
reversal of the philosophy that declared discretion to be ‘the enemy
of order, standardisation and quality’.^36 There are various types of
empowerment, from all-out empowerment, where employees have
absolute power to do whatever is necessary to satisfy the customer,
to milder forms of empowerment, which is essentially ‘suggestion
involvement’. This is where employees can offer suggestions, but
the decision-making power rests with the management. There is
also ‘job empowerment’, where jobs are redesigned so that employ-
ees can determine how they work.
Empowerment means that the company must create the right
culture and climate for employees to operate in. This includes four
empowerment criteria: providing employees with information
about the organization’s performance; providing rewards based on
the organization’s performance; providing employees with knowl-
edge that enables them to understand and contribute to organiza-
tional performance; and giving them power to take decisions that
influence organizational direction and performance.^37
Although there is a growing number of organizations which have
adopted an empowerment approach, there are many that have
failed in their attempts or have met with barriers in their efforts to
create a more empowered culture. Failure is often the result of
middle managers feeling threatened by delegating power and
authority to subordinates. Sometimes staff are reluctant to take on
such responsibility and consider making such empowered decisions
to be managers’ responsibility.
There are of course advantages of empowerment, which can
include a faster and more flexible response to customers’ needs by
confident and well-informed staff. In fact where service failures do
occur, there is evidence that a satisfactorily resolved problem by
322 Relationship Marketing