Determinants of Delegation: A Study in Five Star Hotels
Authors: Jha Sumi 
Published: January 2017

In today's business context, managing the ever increasing customer expectations and need is a key to survival and growth. Considering the people-centric nature of the service industry, particularly the hotel industry, managing the motivation of frontline employees and retaining them for continued customer relationship is a challenge for any organization. Since customers with different needs and aspirations have to be served differently, the frontline employees of five star hotels play a significant role in establishing relationship with customers. To retain the customers, they should be properly trained based on the job they do. Trained frontline employees would understand the characteristics of their job and would be more efficient while serving the customers. The superiors would also need to delegate tasks to the subordinates and this requires adequate knowledge of the job, proper flow of information, and sharing of resources between the superiors and the subordinates.

Based on a sample of 319 frontline employees of five star hotels in Mumbai, this study examines the direct and interaction effects of job characteristics and superior-subordinate relationship on delegation. The primary purpose of job characteristics is to measure job attributes that affect intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction. Job characteristics have been studied in terms of five factors: skill variety task identity feedback dealing with others friendship opportunities.

In the hotel industry, the frontline employees are required to deal with the customers daily and therefore strive to maintain a conducive relationship with them. Dealing with others and friendship opportunity in the job itself help them in enhancing the relationship with customers. Continuous feedback from the superiors also helps the employees in being effective in their work.

Superior-subordinate relationship is defined as the perception of subordinates about the information being shared and support being provided by the superior. It has been seen that if the relationship between the superior and the subordinate is not conducive, it hampers work as the superior may be reluctant to delegate tasks to the subordinate.

The basic concept of delegation in this study is the willingness on the part of the subordinate to accept a given task so that it will result in effective completion. Delegation is measured through three factors: amount of delegation process of delegation facilitating factors of delegation.

Using factor analysis, this paper studies the conceptual differences among variables like job characteristics, superior-subordinate relationship, and delegation. The factor structure that has emerged supports the view that job characteristics, superior-subordinate relationship, and delegation are conceptually from different domains and are independent of each other. Providing better characteristics of job gives the superiors the room to delegate tasks. Repetitive task with no variety in it will make the superior as well as the subordinate less passionate about the job. The major findings of the study are as follows: Direct and indirect effects of job characteristics and superior-subordinate relationship significantly influence delegation. Among the factors of job characteristics, feedback influences delegation the most, i.e., for effective completion of delegated task, continuous feedback is the key. It is imperative to retain frontline employees by providing challenging job and adequate information and by delegating effectively.