MIT Sloan Management Review

Human Resource Management and Industrial Relations, Service and Quality

The Empowerment of Service Workers: What, Why, How, and When

By David E. Bowen and Edward E. Lawler III

April 15, 1992

IN RECENT YEARS, BUSINESSES HAVE RUSHED TO ADOPT AN EMPOWERMENT APPROACH TO SERVICE DELIVERY IN WHICH EMPLOYEES FACE customers “free of rulebooks,” encouraged to do whatever is necessary to satisfy them. But that approach may not be right for everyone. Bowen and Lawler look at the benefits and costs of empowering employees, the range of management practices that empower employees to varying degrees, and key business characteristics that affect the choice of approaches. Managers need to make sure that there is a good fit between their organizational needs and their approach to frontline employees.

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Empowering service workers has acquired almost a “born again” religious fervor. Tom Peters calls it “purposeful chaos.” Robert Waterman dubs it “directed autonomy.” It has also been called the “art of improvisation.”

Yet in the mid-1970s, the production-line approach to service was the darling child of service gurus. They advocated facing the customer with standardized, procedurally driven operations. Should we now abandon this approach in favor of empowerment?

Unfortunately, there is no simple, clear-cut answer. In this article we try to help managers think about the question of whether to empower by clarifying its advantages and disadvantages, describing three forms that empower employees to different degrees, and presenting five contingencies that managers can use to determine which approach best fits their situation. We do not intend to debunk empowerment, rather we hope to clarify why to empower (there are costs, as well as benefits), how to empower (there are alternatives), and when to empower (it really does depend on the situation).

The Production-Line Approach

In two classic articles, the “Production-Line Approach to Service” and the “Industrialization of Service,” Theodore Levitt described how service operations can be made more efficient by applying manufacturing logic and tactics.1 He argued:

Manufacturing thinks technocratically, and that explains its success. . . . By contrast, service looks for solutions in the performer of the task. This is the paralyzing legacy of... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

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