Employee empowerment and customer satisfaction: Empirical evidence from the banking sector of Pakistan

Employee empowerment is a key feature of the modern management style. Empowered employees are expected to perform more effectively as compared to those working in traditional or authoritarian organizational cultures. Keeping in view the significance of the issue, a comparative study was planned to examine the impact of employee empowerment on customer satisfaction. A multistage cluster sample of 644 bank officers was drawn from two banks operating in Pakistan: the first one was a foreign bank (Standard Chartered Ltd.), where employees were empowered, BWEE (Bank with Empowered Employees). The second one was a local public sector bank (The Bank of Punjab) with a traditional management style, where employees were not empowered, BWNEE (Bank with no Empowered Employees). Data collection tools for both variables that is employee empowerment and customer satisfaction were adopted from the body of knowledge and used for data collection. Two independent sets of data were analyzed with the application of regression coefficient. Empirical analysis indicated that there was no relationship between employee empowerment and customer satisfaction in the Pakistani commercial banking sector.