Conformity or Con-Conformity of the Chinese Restaurant to Theories of Employee Empowerment - Case Study Example

Workplace Report - Chinese Restaurant located in Sydney Student’s Name: Course: Tutor’s Name: Date: An introduction to the organisation This workplace report is based on the XYZ Chinese restaurant where a friend to the writer works. The XYZ restaurant is located in Sydney, and has 20 members of staff, 10 who are drawn from China. The rest are Australians, four who serve at managerial positions, while the remaining six serve at subordinate positions that entail cleaning, organizing and enhancing security in the restaurant. The Chinese employees mainly offer different services to clients and are engaged in preparing Chinese dishes, waiting and serving clients, and ensuring that all clients who understand only the Chinese dialect are at ease in the restaurant. The senior manager of the restaurant holds briefing meetings every Monday morning in which he emphasises the need for superior service delivery to all clients. The manager has given employees the authority to accomplish their tasks the best of their knowledge. However, he always underscores that low quality or poor service delivery will not be tolerated by the management. He always encourages the entire service team to work as a team, and set annual sales targets for them to meet. On attaining the set target, or exceeding it, the service team is entitled to bonuses on top of their salaries. Since the restaurant was set up five months ago, the team leader in charge of the service team has complained to the senior manager severally that the Chinese employees seem lost about the best way to handle the decision-making discretion given to them. Instead, they await instructions from him, and have always insisted that the way that Australians do things is different from what they are used to in their own culture. To help the team leader out, the senior manager organized two training sessions to sensitize the Chinese on prevailing Australian cultural norms. Additionally, training sessions for the entire workforce was held to re-orient employees with the restaurant’s vision, safe food handling practices, and disaster preparedness. The team leader has noted that the training sessions did not have much effect on the Chinese’s willingness to take initiative. To this, the senior manager has responded by stating that training will be an ongoing activity until the Chinese employees learn to pursue goals without waiting for instructions from the team leader. In the restaurant, the senior manager readily interacts with all employees and is always checking on them to see if there are any issues that need his attention. During rush hours when the service team is overwhelmed by orders from clients, the senior manager is always at hand to organise the service delivery and ensure that the clients are treated well. Conformity or con-conformity of the Chinese restaurant to theories of employee empowerment According to Davison and Martinsons (2002, p. 43), empowerment ensures that “information is shared with workers; rewards are based on organisational performance; and employees are involved in management decision making”. In others words, the managers are simply not observers of how job-related tasks are performed, but they actively participate in coaching, advising, sponsoring and even facilitating employees, for purposes of ensuring that they (employees) perform their duties optimally. If this were true, one could argue that the Chinese restaurant conforms to employee empowerment theories since its management has given employees the authority to make decisions needed when accomplishing their tasks. The different perceptions held by the Chinese and Australian employees also attest to employee empowerment theories, which suggest that that empowerment is a dynamic and individualistic process. Hence employees have different expectations and desires of what the management should do in order to empower them. Additionally, there is no single empowerment strategy that the employer can use to satisfy all the employees (Foster-Fishman et al.1998, p. 507). Conformity of the Chinese restaurant to empowerment theories is further evident in Yulk and Becker’s (2006, p. 211) view that individual employee’s capacity to be empowered by activities initiated by the employer depend on whether such employer initiatives are meaningful; competent; impactful; or containing choices. Yulk and Becker (2006) define meaningfulness as the value that employees attach to the power given to them by the employer. In the Chinese restaurant case, the leeway provided to employees to make their own decisions regarding the accomplishment of tasks was meaningful to the Australian employees, while the Chinese employees attached little or no meaning to it. Hence, the former were empowered through the management decision, while the latter group preferred to have a more micro-managed working environment. Competence refers to a person’s ability to perform tasks with skill (Thomas and Velthouse, 1990, p. 672). According to Yulk and Becker (2006) however, competence in empowerment theory is not simply about capabilities; rather, it includes a person’s own beliefs regarding whether they can perform specific tasks. In the Chinese restaurant, the psychological aspect of competence is seen when the Chinese employees fail to utilise the leeway provided to accomplish job-related tasks without following a prescribed work routine. To them however, it seems like they are not psychologically empowered to work in non-prescriptive routines. According to Yulk and Becker (2006, p. 211), the element of choice is essential to empowerment theories since it “refers to the causal responsibility for a person’s actions and whether behaviour is perceived as self-determined”. Usually, employees who are motivated most by empowerment are those who have a strong sense of self-determination, since such like initiations and regulation their own actions in the work environment. In the Chinese restaurant, employees drawn from China seem to have an inferior liking for choice, while their Australian counterparts seems to enjoy the flexibility provided by their employer. Another aspect of employee empowerment theory is impact. According to Thomas and Velthouse(1990,p, 672) impact is “the degree to which behaviour is seen as making a difference in terms of accomplishing the purpose of the task, that is producing intended effects in one’s task environment”. In view of this definition, one can argue that employees take up empowering initiatives based on their perceptions regarding the impact that they will have on the company. In the Chinese restaurant for example, the Chinese employees may have feared engaging in the flexible task routines for fear that failing in the tasks would have a great impact on the restaurant’s service delivery. Instead of taking the risk therefore, they preferred having someone to issue instructions, which they would follow without having to worry about messing up. Conformity or con-conformity of the Chinese restaurant to theories of organisational culture Organisational culture is widely acknowledged as having significant influences on employee behaviour and performance (Parker, 2000). Accordingly, organisational culture is defined as “A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration...” (Schein, 1992, p. 12). This is no standard definition by any means. In management literature, different authors have defined culture variably. In the same light, literature contains different theories of organisational culture. Such include, the consistency hypothesis which argues that there is enhanced coordination, meaning, and sense of identification among employees working in organisations where beliefs, perspectives and values are shared (Glendon & Stanton, 2000, p. 194).The mission hypothesis on the other hand advances the idea that organisations that coordinate and galvanise their employees through sharing their sense of direction, purposes and strategies have an enhanced likelihood of attaining collective goals. The involvement/participation theory on the other hand posits that employees get a sense of responsibility and/or ownership from their participation or involvement in work-related tasks, and in the processes they develop loyalty and commitment towards their employer. The adaptability theory on the other hand posits that organisational culture which is evident in the beliefs and norms exhibited therein, affects the organisation’s capacity to receive, understand, and decipher any signals received from the environment. Based on cues received from the environment, the organisation adapts its internal environment in order to survive, grow and develop. A careful look at the Chinese restaurant reveals some interesting cultural aspects. For example, the restaurant has a horizontal communication culture where information flows freely across management ranks. This is made possible by the senior manager’s regular interaction with the employees. One also notes that there is a culture of trust by the management, where employees are allowed some flexibility to determine how they accomplish their tasks. Of the four cited theories of organisational culture, the Chinese restaurant seems to conform to the consistency theory and the mission theory. By sharing a common perspective (i.e. to provide clients with superior quality services), employees in the restaurant work have managed to attain consistency in their duties. The emphasis of team work in the restaurant has also enhanced coordination, which leads to the teams attaining or failing to attain set targets. Team work is seen as having an impact on individual earnings since failing to attain the targets means that the team does not qualify to earn commissions. The restaurant conforms to the mission hypothesis based on the fact that the senior manager seems intent on coordinating and galvanising workers towards attaining collective organisational goals. As such, through participative leadership, he offers a sense of direction and purposes, and probably shares his business strategies with the employees in the belief that such knowledge will enable them attain collective organisational goals. As Reiman and Oedewald (2002, p.7) observe, organisational culture is three-layered with the most superficial layer consisting of artefacts that are visible to onlookers. In the Chinese restaurant’s case, the artefacts could include the quality of service offered in the hotel, the hotel arrangement and customer service. The second layer according to Reiman and Oedewald (2002, p. 7) contains espoused values, which may include management philosophies, goals and strategies. Such values affect the type of artefacts that the organisation has. In the restaurant’s case, the espoused values include the embedded philosophy of providing high quality service to clients. The third and most intrinsic layer as identified by Reiman and Oedewald (2002) contains underlying assumptions such as feelings, thoughts, perceptions and beliefs. Since the third layer is the most basic in every individual, Reiman and Oedewald (2002, p.7) cite it as “the ultimate source of values and actions”. Differences between theories and practice There are notable differences between the Chinese restaurant practices and theories on employee empowerment and organisation culture. Mostly, the differences occur because theories are formulated according to ideal situations. Notably however, the Chinese restaurant is far from ideal especially considering that no prior training about the Australian culture was offered to the Chinese expatriate workers. As Davison and Martisons (2002, p. 46) observe, cultural factors that are common among people of the same society or heritage affect how they behave when they are in an organisational setting. For example, the differences between the Australian and Chinese national cultures mean that employees drawn from the two cultures handle empowerment and aspects of organisational culture differently. Recommendations Seeing that a fraction of the employees do not appreciate the empowerment practices adopted by the management in the restaurant, and noting that the employees drawn from China are yet to adjust to a foreign culture, the management should consider introducing more intense training and mentoring programs, specifically targeting orienting the Chinese employees with the Australian national culture. According to Forrester (2000, p. 70), employees who are uncomfortable with processes or tasks, or those who lack confidence in their competencies, will hesitate accepting any roles that require them to be responsible or accountable to their supervisors or managers. The resistance that the Chinese employees put up is evidence that they are either not properly oriented with the organisational culture, or they do not have the skills or confidence needed to handle the responsibilities that come with the tasks. The management need to learn about the Chinese cultural affects that may affect the performance of his employees in order to devise the right training programs for them. As Martisons and Davison (2000) observe the power distance between employees and their superiors in the Chinese culture is more pronounced than is the case in most developed countries, and this may affect the way Chinese workers adopt to workplaces where participative management approaches are practiced. Appendix: Organisation Chart References Davison, R. & Martinsons, M. (2002) ‘Empowerment or enslavement? A case of process-based organizational change in Hong Kong’, Information Technology & people, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 42-59. Forrester, R. (2000) ‘Empowerment: rejuvenating a potent idea’, Academy of Management Executive, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 67-80. Foster-Fishman, P., Salem, D., Chibnall, S., Legler, R. & Yapchai, C (1998) ‘Empirical support for the critical assumptions of empowerment theory’, American Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 507-536. Glendon, A. I. & Stanton, N. A. (2000) ‘Perspectives on safety culture, Safety Science, vol. 34, pp. 193-214. Martisons, M. & Davison, R. (2000) ‘Cultural considerations in business process change’, Working Paper, 00/04, Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Parker, M. (2000) Organizational culture and identity. Sage, London. Reiman, T. & Oedewald, P. (2002) ‘The assessment of organizational culture: a methodological study’, VTT Research Notes 2140, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Vuorimiehentie, pp. 1-43. Schein, E. H. (1992), Organizational Culture and Leadership, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco. Thomas, K. W. & Velthouse, B. A. (1990) ‘Cognitive elements of empowerment: An "interpretive" model of intrinsic task motivation, Academy of Management Review, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 666-681. Yulk, G.A. & Becker, W. S. (2006) ‘Effective empowerment in organizations’, Organisation Management Journal, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 210-231. Read More