Abstract
Purpose - According to resource-based view, companies derive exceptional human resource from the motivation of employee empowerment. Research conducted by employee empowerment has focused on if employees generally believe in the importance of employee empowerment, does implementing empowerment yield consistent results (importance-performance analysis). It is, therefore, valuable to investigate how cultural values of different countries impact employee’s valuation of the importance and effectiveness of empowerment.
Design/methodology/approach - This study collected data using a paper questionnaire in hotels in Malaysia, Thailand and South Korea. The questionnaires distributed by human resource managers to employees in the hospitality, 1025(Malaysia), 304(Thailand) and 385(South Korea) replied with completed data.
Findings - The findings indicate that supervisors of Malaysian hotel could provide support and training for the professional career development of employees, listen to employees, communicate thoroughly, establish transparent career promotion paths, facilitate employees to clearly understand the functions and goals to be achieved at each stage, and understand what professional training programs the hotel provides; Thai hotel managers could reallocate resources to other areas, such as innovation or human resource management, so that overall organizational resources may be better used; Korean hotel supervisors could give employees for freedom to make decisions, whether that is within the scope of their work or crossing boundaries to assist a coworker.
Originality/value - There has been little research on the cross-cultural analysis of employee empowerment. This study investigated the difference across groupings of the status of employee empowerment of hotel industry employees from Malaysia, Thailand and South Korea
Keywords: Employee Empowerment, Importance-Performance Analysis, Cross-Cultural Values, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea.