Abstract
Employee empowerment has considered as an effective human resource instrument for improving the service quality of the hospitality industry. Cultural diversity is seen as an influential factor effecting the implementation of employee empowerment, and research increasingly studies the influences generated by cultural diversity. On the other hand, the emerging of the youngest generation (Generation Y, or Gen Y) in the workforce has also been introducing implications to human resource management because the Gen Y significantly differs from the previous generations in terms of work values. The generational diversity also attracts much more attention from academic research, which is largely conducted under Western social contexts and implies the importance for the management of establishing a thorough understanding of this issue. It is revealed that the number of East Asian staff is continuously increasing in Australia's service industry, most of them belonging to the cohort of the Gen Y. Given this fact, organizations need to gain a clear insight of this group, because they may be influenced by two different values in the workplace, Confucianism and Gen Y values. Previous studies have found a strong contradiction between the two values, and indicate that Confucianism shows significant incongruence with employee empowerment, whilst the Gen Y values are more likely to be supportive of his human resource instrument. Consequently, the clarification of the co-influences of the two values to the group of staff on their attitudes and reactions to employee empowerment is essential for Australia's service organizations to effectively apply empowerment in their multi-cultural workplaces and to ensure their high standard of service quality. For the purpose of clarifying the critical issue above, semi-structured interviews were conducted. The findings of the research demonstrate that the Gen Y values have considerable influences on the Confucian Gen Y employees because a higher individualistic sense was presented by the interviewees compared to the general Confucian employees, and a strong interest was shown by them to employee empowerment. On the other hand, however, Confucianism still dominates the minds of the cohort, which showed a less obvious but decisive influence on them when potential threats to the basic Confucian values were detected. It is assumed that the co-existence of the two values in the cohort is still evolving and further research is recommended in certain directions.