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Developing serving culture: focus on workplace empowerment


Purpose
Based on the data gathered from healthcare organizations, the purpose of this paper is to identify new antecedents of service quality. The proposed model posits that workplace empowerment should increase a level of employee helping behaviors, thus supporting the development of a firm’s serving culture. Consequently, while focusing on two forms of workplace empowerment, the study empirically tests mediating paths that link structural empowerment and psychological empowerment with service quality via serving culture. The findings expand the understanding of how companies could better manage evolving demands of their customers. Furthermore, the project provides clear guidelines to practitioners by suggesting how firms should allocate their organizational resources to boost service quality.


Design/methodology/approach
The study uses the original survey data collected from healthcare organizations to empirically test the mediating paths linking structural empowerment, psychological empowerment and service quality via serving culture. The data were tested using structural equation modeling.


Findings
Although the initial model assumed that both types of workplace empowerment should play equally important roles in the development of serving culture, the data reveal the statistical significance of structural empowerment. Thereby, findings emphasize that in health care, employees must be provided with access to key organizational resources (e.g., vertical and horizontal information flow) to drive up quality of service.


Originality/value
This research is one of a few empirical studies examining antecedents of serving culture. An overall implication of the study should be a reinforced call for more empirical studies that could identify how companies could develop serving culture. Furthermore, the paper proposes that managers must remove structural barriers that may exist in their organizations to empower employees to better manage changing customer needs.
