The Relationship Between Frontline Employees Empowerment, Creativity, And Job Performance In Service Industry

Background and Literature Review

Today’s marketplace is massively competitive, so many companies must recognise customers’ needs and wants and provide and offer better service, and solution for customers problems (Lovelock, Patterson, and Wirtz 2011). Amabile et al. (1996) states that employees creativity has significant role to play to achieve organisational innovation, effectiveness, and performance. It is highly required that if frontline service employees, who want to deliver outstanding service need to demonstrate creativity as each customer has different wants and needs (Wilder, Collier, and Barnes 2014).

Consequently, this study examines how frontline service employees’ empowerment relates to their creativity and job performance. Precisely, this research tests the model, where creativity is as the mediating role between employee empowerment and performance and service climate used as moderating effect between creativity and performance. 

The conceptual model is presented in figure 1. The model illustrates that frontline service employee empowerment is related to job performance through creativity. It also hypothesis that service climate (organisational culture) can influence on constructs of this study.

In this study the conceptual model is understood as the componential theory of creativity proposed by Amabile (1983). Amabile (1988) states that creativity is essential in the organisation to solve problems, deal with uncertainties, and achieve superb outcome.

Amabile Componential theory indicates that there are three domains: creativity-domain skills, social environments, and creativity-relevant skills.

Many literatures have been paying attention to creativity. It has been defined as creating useful and novel idea, focusing on individual attitude about process, procedures, and services to achieve effective organisational result (Amabile 1988, 2012; Ellsworth 2002; Oldman and Cummings 1996; Zhang and Bartol 2010). Employees must have creative attitude, skills and personality to be able to solve the problems (Darley, Glucksberg, and Kinchla 1986). Frontline service employee creativity is very important because they deal with different customers who have different needs and wants, thus employees need to provide better and feasible solution to customers problem before customers complain (Homburg, Wieseke, and Torsten 2009; Wilder, Collier, and Barnes 2014).

Job performance define as employee’s behaviour towards customers, co-workers and organisation to obtain organisational goals. (Bettencourt and Brown 1997). Two aspects such as in-role performance and extra-role performance has been identifies in employee performance. In-role performance define as all the prescribed roles that employees are required by the organisation to fulfil and extra-role performance that refers to non-prescribed role (helping colleagues with their personal problems) that individuals fulfil (Mackenzie, Podsakoff, and Ahearne 1998; Bettencourt and Brown 1997).

Conceptual Model and Hypotheses

Empowered employee can be engaged in discretionary behaviour for the purpose of helping a customer to meet their expectations (Klidas, Berg, and Wilderson 2007). Empowerment gives employees the authority to make decision independently, and be more creative (Klidas, Berg, and Wilderson 2007). For example, taking instant action to solve customer problem even if the problem is not related to employee (e.g., giving customers a discount).

Empowered employee uses their creativity and does whatever it takes to make customer satisfy as customers are willing to get quick fix for their issues and they don’t like to hear “this is against rules” (Brymer 1991; Jones, Tylor, and Nickson 1997; Lashley 1997). Empowerment decreases employee stress and leads them to innovative behaviour and believe in themselves. Empowerment has a significant positive effect on employees’ task performance and loyalty, mediated by employees’ satisfaction (Yao, Chen, and Gouliang (2013).

Job performance mostly relies on frontline service employees in service context because they creative thinking encourages them to generate new ideas to solve customer problems and facilitate excellent customer purchase experience (Zeithaml, Parasuraman, and Berry 1990). Creativity as an individual personality trait, individual can use for problem-solving and that shapes the habit of thoughts and attitudes, which then influences the individual’s performance (Baer 1991). Empowered employee takes more responsibility and use their creativity to achieve better outcome (Yang, Choi 2009).

Every organisation has different culture and is where individuals have mutual communication and understanding of shared beliefs, values, and norms (Matins and Terblanche 2003). Organisational culture is a useful tool to help employees to improve their communication, learning, valuing, trusting, which all these factors have positive effect on employee’s productivity (Levine 2017; Martins and Terblanche 2003; Martin, and Siehl 1990).

Service climate is the organisational culture, where employee share their views and perceptions about organisational practices, policies, and procedures that are expected, supported, and rewarded (Holt 1993; Patterson, Warr, and West 2004; Schneider, White, and Paul 1998). Employees’ norms, shared values, beliefs, and behaviours as well as a supportive and flexible team are some examples of service climate (Johnson 1996; Jong, Ruyter, and Lemmink 2004).

Service climate is very important for increasing and encouraging employee’s creativity, and performance. To enrich employee creativity, it is very momentous for the organisation to have a service climate where support, challenge, freedom, openness, and being able to cope with uncertainty, empowerment is provided (Ekvall and Ryhammar 1999).

Frontline service employees are responsible to deliver outstanding service climate to provide superb service to achieve high performance (Boshoff and Allen 2000).

Methodology

Hypothesis 1: Service climate moderates the relationship between employee creativity and job performance.

The data for this research were collected using an online panel. To be qualified for this study, respondent need to be over 18 years old, have worked in service industry last 10 years and have direct contact with customers. In total, 800 frontline employees will be invited to complete the questionnaires. The survey questions are taken from previous studies and have been tested in the same concept.

Zhou and George’s (2001) 13-item scale, for creativity have been used. Four items are taken from Scott and Bruce’s (1994) and nine items was developed for their study. The construct is measured on a five-point scale where 1 is “not at all characteristic” and 5 is “very characteristic.”

Goodman and Svyantek (1999)’s 25 items are also used in this study to measure performance. Items in this scale measure in-role and extra-role performance, and all items in this scale are measured on a five-point Likert scale (1 = never; 5 = always).

Jong, Ruyter, and Lemmink’s (2004) scale was adopted for service climate. This scale contains six items in SMT service climate measures, six items in tolerance for self-management, four items in flexibility of team members, seven items in inter-team support, and seven items in intrateam support. We used the first six item for service climate to measure service climate and we modified questions in terms of wording to fit into our study, and the rest of the items we did not use because it did not fit in present study. Items are measured using a seven-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 “strongly disagree” to 7 “strongly agree.”

Chan and Lam (2011) scale was used to empowerment. Four items in seven-point scale ranging from 1=” strongly agree,” 7= “strongly disagree”.

This was a case study design. A case study is an in-depth investigation of an individual, institution or phenomenon (Bornman et al. 2007). The primary purpose of a case study was to determine factors and relationships among the factors that have resulted in the behaviour under study. Since this study sought to establish the relationship between employee empowerment and performance of the frontline a case study design was deemed the best design to fulfil the objectives of the study.

The study used both primary and secondary data. The primary data was collected through a structured questionnaire administered on a drop and pick basis. The questionnaire had both open-ended questions and closed ended questions. The questionnaire was divided in two parts; part one focused on biographical data while part two addressed employee empowerment. Data on performance as measured by return on assets was collected from secondary sources.

Results

The population of interest comprised all the frontline employees of the City Council. This was reinforced by the fact that the council was top performer in performance contract. A sample of 1800 frontline service employees were the respondents for the questionnaire. The respondents were selected randomly.

For this study, the employee empowerment was the independent variable while the performance measured by the return on assets was the dependent variable.

Since this study aims at examining how frontline service employee’s empowerment relates to their creativity and the job performance, we wish to test the hypothesis in order to very this.

A one sample independent t-test was thus conducted to determine whether there exist any significant relationship between the frontline service employee’s empowerment and their job performance and creativity

The null and alternative hypotheses for this research can therefore be formulated and stated as follows;

H₀: There is no significant relationship between the frontline employee’s empowerment to their creativity and job performance.

H₁: There is significant relationship between the frontline employee’s empowerment to their creativity and job performance

The analysis was conducted in SPSS version 22 and the output shown in the table below 1shows the results of the analysis.

Table 1: Output of the result

Employee empowerment on creativity and performance:   

Empowerment    ?>  Creativity   ?>   Performance

Employees Creativity    Boot SE   BootLLCI BootULCI  

  1.145   .215   .115   .114   .375      .000   .244   .031   .252   .513      .945   .071     .161   .942   .219    

???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????  

Index of Moderated Mediation:   

                                           Index         SE (Boot)  BootLLCI      BootULCI  

Employee Creativity       1.287           1 .238           2.112         2.118   

Interpretation of the results

The relationship between employee’s empowerment, creativity and performance

Based on the results obtained and presented in the table 1 above, and by using the hypothesis testing on the established model at 95% confidence interval, the results shows that the p-value 1.145 is greater than 0.05. In this case, we reject the null hypothesis and conclude that there is significant relationship between the frontline employee’s empowerment to their creativity and the job performance.

Also, the moderator variable has a p-value of 1.287 which is greater than 0.05 at 5% level of significance hence these two cases suggest that we need to reject the null hypothesis.

In regard to this research, various contributions are to be drawn which when borrowed, can contribute massively to managerial and problem solving practices.

Conclusion

This research presents extent to which an organization or a company can put in place employee empowerment programs that can help them realize their potential in both managerial and decision making.

The study also presents formal recommendation to the overall public on the relationship between employee’s empowerment, creativity and performance. 

Conclusion

In today’s complex and competitive market place employee’s creativity, empowerment, and job performance are important for firms to survive. Successful firms aim to boost environment where creative behaviour is encouraged and empowers them to make decisions if they need to give a quick respond to customers complain. Frontline employee’s empowerment and creativity is very vital because they are the voice and representative of their organisation and organisational climate to the customers.

Frontline employees are organisational assets and they have direct relationship with customers. They are the bridge between customers and organisation. Frontline service creativity and empowerment can help them to help customers better and facilitate the better customer experience with the firm. Providing good experience for customers makes them loyal, happy which leads for better outcome for company and customer. 

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