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Introduction
Empowerment involves giving employees the autonomy to make decisions about how they go about their daily activities ([14] Carless, 2004; [29] Haas, 2010). As service industries become more competitive, the importance of empowerment in service industries is increasingly recognized as a key to catering to more and more demanding customers ([10] Boshoff and Allen, 2000).
However, empowerment is contextual ([23] Foster-Fishman et al. , 1998). It is a social construct nested in how an individual integrates perceptions of personal control, a proactive approach to life and an understanding of the socio-political environment ([64] Perkins, 1995; [71] Rappaport, 1995; [94] Zimmerman, 1995; [65] Perkins and Zimmerman, 1995). Hence, empowerment can be viewed differently across cultures ([73] Robert et al. , 2000; [22] Fock et al. , 2002) and thus the success of empowerment as a managerial practice depends on an appropriate understanding of the culturally based assumptions, values and beliefs held by those who are being managed ([33] Hofstede, 1993; [73] Robert et al. , 2000; [87] Wang, 2008). In particular, incongruence between empowerment as a management practice and cultural values may be influential in high power distance nations where subordinates are accustomed to unquestioningly taking orders from their supervisors ([36] Hui et al. , 2004; [38] Humborstad et al. , 2008b).
Results of the few empowerment studies conducted in high power distance cultural contexts have been inconsistent ([36] Hui et al. , 2004; [69] Powpaka, 2008). For example, [73] Robert et al. (2000) failed to obtain conclusive findings. In their study, the empowerment-job satisfaction relationship was revealed to be negative in the India sample, but this relationship was found otherwise in some other high power distance country samples. On the other hand, [36] Hui et al. (2004) provided support for variation in empowerment effects on job satisfaction and the intention to comply with customer requests being a function of power distance, after controlling some extraneous variables. Also, empowerment's effect on organizational commitment shows inconclusive results. [96] Bhatnagar (2007) and [100] Chen and Chen (2008) found that some of the sub-dimensions of empowerment were positively correlated to organizational commitment, but others were negatively or not correlated to organizational commitment in their India and Taiwan samples, respectively. It is important that this uncertainty be explored...