Empowerment is one of those terms that sounds positive but has been applied across a wide range of contexts and situations. Certainly, the authors of this book are committed to students being empowered as individuals through education and the pursuit of knowledge. That said, this text is primarily concerned with creating a critical understanding of leisure service organizations. Hence, we are concerned with empowerment in work organizations which provide leisure services.
Empowerment has been attractive as a management technique in leisure service organizations because it seems to provide a strategy for managing the service encounter in a more effective manner. Empowered employees are said to be more committed to making happy customers. Managerial motives for introducing empowerment vary and, as a consequence, empowerment takes a variety of forms across leisure service organizations. In these circumstances it is important to adopt a framework for analysing empowerment. Empowerment involves both the objective facts of what a person is empowered to do and the subjective feelings which the individual experiences as a result. Initiatives introduced empowered by and the management sense of will, personal therefore, efficacy be created. tested No against matter the which experience form of empow-being empowered and the sense of personal efficacy created. No matter which form empowerment may take, initiatives entitled 'empowerment' will be exposed as empty rhetoric if they do not produce in the recipients feelings of being empowered. Thus the 'boundaries organizational set for processes the in which empowered'
the organizational processes in which the empowered work and the management
of those processes become crucial factors in the development of personal efficacy and empowerment.