THE IMPACT OF STAFF EMPOWERMENT AND COMMUNICATION STYLE ON CUSTOMER EVALUATIONS - THE SPECIAL CASE OF SERVICE FAILURE

Empowering front-line staff to deal with service failures has been pro posed as a method of recovering from service breakdown and ensuring gr eater customer satisfaction. However, no empirical study has investiga ted consumer responses to empowerment strategies. This research invest igates the effect on customer satisfaction and service quality of two employee characteristics: the degree to which the employee is empowere d (full, limited, and none), and the employee's communication style (a ccommodative - informal and personal, and underaccommodative-formal an d impersonal). These employee characteristics are studied within the c ontext of service failures. Subjects were shown videotaped service sce narios, and asked to complete satisfaction and service quality ratings . Results revealed that the fully empowered employee produced more cus tomer satisfaction than the other conditions, but only when the servic e provider used an accommodating style of communication. Fully empower ed and nonempowered employees were not judged differently when an unde raccommodating style of communication was adopted. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.