A longitudinal analysis of an accelerating effect of empowerment on job satisfaction: Customer-contact vs. non-customer-contact workers

The primary purpose of this paper is to examine whether the impact of empowerment on job satisfaction increases as time changes, and whether this impact is stronger for customer-contact employees than non-customer-contact employees. This study employs a Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) technique to test research hypotheses using a longitudinal dataset from an annual employee opinion survey conducted by a hospitality company in the United States for three consecutive years; 67 work teams consisting of 1534 employees are the unit of analysis. This study finds that the effect of empowerment on job satisfaction is more salient for customer-contact employees, and the effect of empowerment accelerates over the years regardless of the nature of work. Implications of the findings are discussed for researchers and industry practitioners alike.