Increasingly both academic and industrial commentators advocate that a commitment to service quality improvement requires the development of ''service driven culture'' or a ''total quality culture'', based on approaches to human resource management which ensure greater employee involvement and empower ment. Harvester Restaurants is an organization which has made attempts to address some of these issues through the empowerment of employees in the group's restaurants. Autonomous work groups and a flat organization structure are intended both to encourage service deliverers to take responsibility for the service encounter, and to focus organization management on effective unit performance. Reports on research with Harvester Restaurants currently being undertaken by staff at the Centre for Hospitality Management at Nottingham Trent University. Explores the intentions, expectations and experiences of moving towards an empowered organization. Considers both the objective form of empowerment, and the state of being empowered - the perceptions and feelings of being empowered. Attempts to show how the nature of an organization's markets, the degree of standardization/customization, relative importance of the tangibles and intangibles as sources of customer satisfaction, and brand attributes are likely to shape the form of empowerment introduced in a given context. Provides some general background to the project through a discussion of the meanings of empowerment and some details of the Harvester Restaurants and its brand. Discusses the research project and the intentions of researchers. Findings reflect the company's experience since it introduced the initiative and observations of team members and managers working under the new initiative.
