Empowerment discrepancies: are employees empowered as they prefer in hotels in selected areas of Thailand?

ABSTRACT Empowerment has been extensively studied in the nursing field, and, in recent years, management has shown increasing attention. However, critics have raised an important issue about whether the effectiveness of empowerment practices in organizations depends on employees’ perceptions and their organizational contexts. In this article, we address this critique by: 1) assessing the discrepancies between perceived experiences and expectations of contextual empowerment, 2) examining the effect of the discrepancies between perceived experiences and expectations of contextual empowerment on psychological empowerment, in four-star hotels in Thailand. The contextual empowerment instrument, along with the psychological empowerment measurement, were tested for their psychometric properties and confirmed using factor analysis. Structural equation modelling was then performed to test the hypothesized model. The findings contribute to human resource development as we believe that this study responds to the recent call for addressing discrepancies between perceived experiences and expectations of contextual empowerment with an enlarging understanding of how these discrepancies affect psychological empowerment.