ABSTRACT

The study examined the sustainable employee empowerment and customer satisfaction in hotels in Umuahia. The objectives of the study are; To examine the application of employee empowerment on the hotels in the study area, ascertain the role of the applied employee empowerment status on customer satisfaction in the study area, examine the factors affecting employee empowerment in an organization in the study area, determine the way forward to employee empowerment in the study area. To achieve the objective of the study, survey research design was adopted. The researcher adopted primary data in getting the required information through the use of structured questionnaire. The population of the study is 38 registered hotels in Umuahia, Abia State with 520 staff strength. The sample size of the study is 226 after adopting Taro Yamane formula. In analyzing the data, simple descriptive statistics was used. The findings revealed that there is high level of application of employee empowerment in hotel establishments. The findings also revealed that applied employee empowerment plays a significant role on customer satisfaction in the study area. The findings further revealed that there are many factors affecting employee empowerment in the hotel establishments which includes lack of skills, lack of trust, lack of clear policies, job insecurity, failure to identify empowerment, lack of top management example and lack of training. The study recommends that employees need to be trained and updated to be knowledgeable and resource full to give full-fledged service to the customers they are rendering service. Training for technical and interactive skills: for employees to deliver service quality they need an on-going training in the necessary technical skills and knowledge and in- process or interactive skills.