The Role of Empowerment, Customer Orientation and Organizational Factors in Hospitality Organizations Case study: Mellat bank third zone branches of Tehran

The present study investigated the influence of employees’ customer orientation and organizational factors on the employee empowerment perceptions.

With a Practical Approach a convenient sample of 176 guest contact employees working at a bank completed a pencil-and-paper based questionnaire voluntarily.

Our findings suggest that hospitality organizations should have appropriate organizational supporting systems including service training and service communication to enhance employees’ empowerment. Employee's customer orientation is an important antecedent of their perceived empowerment. In other words, the more employees describe themselves as customer oriented, the more they feel confident about their job performance. Although customer orientation do not necessarily increase the sense of their impacts on the organization, organizational supporting factors such as training and service standards communication do increase the perception of their influence in the workplaces.

This study suggests hiring employees with customer oriented personality is important for hospitality organizations to cultivate an empowerment culture. Thus, we suggest that hospitality organizations HR managers must focus on assessing an individual's customer orientation during the interview process.

In this study, which has been done in one of the largest Iranian banks with many customers, proof that, whatever HR managers attempt to hire customer-oriented employees and support them whit explaining service standards communication, they will have more empowered employees. Hence, the results of such research are propelling the managers to the promotion and excellence of human resource and use it to achieve success in today's businesses.