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We examined the state of “enchantment” as a consumer motivator, especially in the context of social and travel restrictions during COVID-19. An online purposive sample ( n = 104) provided narrative data and ratings of past experiences versus future expectations of enchantment. Linguistic cluster analysis revealed five categories of these experiences termed Escapade, Nostalgia, Catharsis, Communion, and Attachment. These categories strongly align to hospitality-tourism offerings, but businesses must help consumers to overcome certain stated barriers (COVID and economic concerns) to future experiences of enchantment. Moreover, people often intend to relive their past experiences of enchantment but will opt for “escapades” when novelty is desired or repeats are unworkable.

Given the importance of well-designed and well-executed training programs, it is important to learn more about the content and design of effective training programs for new employees, particularly those that have been implemented in the hospitality industry. Through a field study assessment of pre-opening training programs that have been implemented by fifteen hotel firms and sixteen restaurant companies, we found that hotels and restaurants spend approximately the same time on pre-opening training for new staff, with the exception of restaurant managers, who receive significantly more days of training than do their hotel counterparts. In addition, there were substantive differences in the amount of pre-opening training based on firm size and whether the company was publicly traded or privately held. We also found that the majority of pre-opening training is designed and delivered by corporate staff, and a balance of active and passive training methods are used for facilitation. Finally, although our survey methodology did not allow us to determine the costs associated with pre-opening training (and therefore the return on these efforts), we noted that the firms used guest satisfaction measures and measured the employees’ content mastery, among other metrics.

Wright and Snell (1998) contend that HR flexibility is an important construct that may enable managers and management scholars to gain a greater understanding of the role of human resource management in enhancing firm performance. However, there is limited evidence regarding the psychometric properties of the measures that have been used to assess the HR flexibility construct and examine its effects. A primary objective of this study was to develop and validate a psychometrically sound measure of the HR flexibility construct. In this article, we present evidence of content validity/adequacy, internal consistency reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and criterion-related validity that provides support for the use of this study’s multidimensional HR flexibility measure in subsequent empirical inquiries and theory testing efforts. Implications and limitations of this current research as well as avenues for future research are discussed.

While scholars know a great deal about the operational challenges faced by customer-contact employees in the hospitality industry, there is much to be learned about the factors associated with the work context that influences employee motivation, performance, and retention. In this study, the authors examined the nature and impact of perceptions about an organization’s customer service climate on ratings of self-efficacy, customer service job performance, and intentions to leave among employees in customer-contact positions. Results demonstrated that employees’ perceptions about the climate for service quality were significantly related to motivation, supervisor ratings of service job performance, and self-rated intentions to leave. The results offer insights regarding the role of service climate perceptions and the means for effectively managing customer-contact staff and generating higher levels of retention.

Although few hospitality organizations are listed in the annual survey of Fortune magazine’s one hundred best companies to work for, an analysis of companies with similar operating challenges provides clear direction for hospitality and service companies’ human resource practices. This study examined twenty-one companies, including one food-service firm (Starbucks) and three hotel chains (Four Seasons, Kimpton, and Marriott). The remainder of the companies analyzed were grocery and health care organizations, both of which share human resources issues with the hospitality industry, such as long operating hours, relatively high turnover, and relatively low pay. The innovative human resources practices isolated in this analysis were a culture that emphasizes the value of people, scheduling flexibility, creative staffing practices, people-oriented training programs, transparent and well-aligned performance management policies, and compensation policies that reflect the organization’s values and link pay to performance.

The purpose of this study was to examine the utility of using two posttraining interventions—self-coaching and upward feedback—to enhance the effectiveness of formal training on interpersonal skills for managers. Data from eighty-seven restaurant manager trainees demonstrated that both interventions were useful extensions to formal classroom training and appear to have substantial utility for helping managers develop and improve their interpersonal skills.

To gain insights about the nature and expenses of specific aspects of employee turnover, the authors gathered data from thirty-three U.S. hotels and found that the costs of turnover were generally higher for (1) high-complexity jobs; (2) independent properties; (3) high—average daily rate (ADR) properties; (4) large properties; and (5) high-occupancy properties. The authors also identified several activities associated with recruitment, selection, and training that were linked to lower overall costs of turnover. The results shed new light on the nature and consequences of turnover and provide some prescriptive guidance for managing this serious operational and strategic challenge.

All hospitality operators want employees who can learn their jobs quickly and have personality traits that allow them to maintain their performance over time. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to find individuals who possess all of the desirable attributes, and thus, some degree of compromise is generally required. The prevailing view is to select those with great personalities and then train them for the technical job requirements. However, strict adherence to this perspective is not advisable. The study presented in this article found that both general mental ability and conscientiousness are important for predicting the performance of restaurant employees on the front line. Moreover, it appears that these two individual characteristics are important at different stages of an employee's job tenure. Using data from 241 line-level restaurant employees, the study found that general mental ability was a better predictor of performance for new employees, whereas conscientiousness was a better predictor of performance for experienced employees. These findings have direct implications for staffing decisions, as well as new employee training and development and performance management.

Human resources (HR) management constitutes a blend of human-capital practices, some of which are required for corporate maintenance, but others of which create value for a company. The task that faces HR managers who seek to establish the financial impact of their departments is to be able to show which practices are the ones that create value. One wide-ranging study has shown a clear relationship between specific human-capital-management practices and increased shareholder value. However, apparently not all HR practices boost value—even though it seems they should. Although additional research will be needed to establish which practices boost the bottom line (and which are merely maintenance activities), the data indicate what HR managers have long suspected. That is, HR-management practices are not a necessary evil that creates a drag on corporate profits, as some executives seem to believe. Rather, solid human-capital management does improve corporate profits and creates shareholder value.

Human resources (HR) has become increasingly integral to the success of hospitality firms. At the same time, HR professionals have identified the key competencies required for their field. No longer merely a “personnel” function, HR is essential to a business’s success. To that end, HR professionals at all levels have established industry-wide certification programs that embrace not only the classic administrative aspects of the position but also the financial and general business knowledge that helps ensure that HR will drive a firm’s success. ARAMARK’s orientation program provides an example of integrating HR professionals into all areas of an operation. ARAMARK Harrison Lodging (AHL) Services has established its “HR Rep” program, which has brought some forty HR professionals into the business to date, with notable success. In this program, AHL’s HR reps become involved in all aspects of the operation, including such unusual areas as finance, sales, marketing, and individual clients’ operations.

For the current study, the authors examined the relationships among two dimensions of organizational climate and several indices of individual and unit-level effectiveness. Specifically, the article proposes that an organization's service and training climate would be related to employee capabilities—operationalized in terms of frontline service capabilities and managerial support capabilities—and that such capabilities would be related to unitlevel measures of employee turnover and sales growth. Using survey and operational data from 201 management and frontline staff members in 22 units of a national restaurant chain, the results from correlation and regression analyses generally supported the proposed relationships. This study replicates and extends previous research and provides a foundation for future conceptual development and empirical work in this research area.

Recent history has only reinforced guests’ preferences regarding meeting-space attributes. Tops is safety and security, followed by service, service, service.

Employee turnover does more than reduce service quality and damage employee morale—it hits a hotel's pocketbook.

Although procedures for assessing content validity have been widely publicized for many years, Hinkin noted that there continue to be problems with the content validity of measures used in organizational research. Anderson and Gerbing, and Schriesheim, Powers, Scandura, Gardiner, and Lankau discussed the problems associated with typical content validity assessment and presented techniques that can be used to assess the empirical distinctiveness of a set of survey items. This article reviews these techniques and presents an analysis of variance procedure that can provide a higher degree of confidence in determining item integrity and scale content validity. The utility of this technique is demonstrated by using two samples and two different measures.

As is true of many facets of the hospitality industry, the meeting business combines both tangible products and intangible services. A study of the factors that affected meeting planners' and participants' ratings of a meeting's success returned a list of 50 factors in nine categories. Although meeting planners and meeting participants consider a number of different factors in their assessment of a meeting's success, the two groups have many criteria in common. Top on everyone's list were security-related items and the staff's performance. While security must be a given, the staff members' competence and appropriate staffing levels are critical to a meeting's success. Also high on the common list were sensory attributes of the meeting rooms and quality of the guest rooms. One item on which planners and participants diverged was food and beverage quality; participants considered it a priority, while planners thought it less so. It is also important to note that sensory attributes of the meeting room—such as climate control, lighting, and comfort—may have more effect on customer satisfaction than the physical attributes, such as pinnable walls and breakout rooms.

In June 1998 the U.S. Supreme Court issued three separate rulings regarding workplace sexual harassment. In an apparent victory for employers, the court ruled in one case that a victim must actually suffer a tangible loss (i.e., a demotion or unwelcome transfer) to establish a case for quid pro quo harassment. The court affirmed, moreover, that employers can absolve themselves of liability in hostile-environment cases by establishing a meaningful and effective policy against sexual harassment. Absent a meaningful policy, however, employers will be liable for a hostile environment created by supervisors. Thus, in another case, the court found an employer liable for workplace harassment because the employer pp. 14-21 failed to disseminate its existing policy and to follow its terms. Finally, in a same-sex harassment case, the court rejected the notion that egregious sexual harassment is per se unlawful, leaving open the possibility that a harasser who treats men and women equally, no matter how badly, could be found not guilty of unlawful behavior. Still, the court made it clear that an employer's best defense against supervisors' sexual-harassment behavior is an effective prevention policy. Consequently, employers should draft a policy that (1) defines sexual harassment; (2) states the company prohibits such conduct; (3) provides a clear procedure for submitting claims, including the names of individuals involved in the resolution process; (4) states that those who complain or cooperate with an investigation will not be retaliated against; and (5) is disseminated to all new employees when they join the company, reissued to all employees each year, and posted in a conspicuous location in the workplace.

Over the past several years, much attention has been given to Bass and Avolio's notion of transformational leadership. However, there are striking similarities between Bass and Avolio's concepualization and several fundamental managerial practices. To examine this concern, we conducted a study that compared the transformational leadership scales from Bass and Avolio's Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) with four scales from Yukl's Managerial Practices Survey (MPS). The results provided mixed support for the distinctiveness of the MQ. A confirmatory factor analysis supported a distinction between the underlying constructs measured by the MLQ and MPS scales. In addition, a composite measure of transformational leadership did account for a significant proportion of variance in ratings of leader effectiveness, beyond that accounted for by the MPS scales. However, the proposed dimensionality of the MLQ was not supported, and the MLQ scales were highly related to the MPS scales.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the process for developing reliable and valid measurement instruments that can be used in any hospitality industry field research setting. Many instances exist in which the researcher cannot find an adequate or appropriate existing scale to measure an important construct. In these situations it is necessary to create a new scale. Failure to carefully develop a measurement instrument can result in invalid and uninterpretable data. Hence, a systematic seven-step process is outlined here to assist researchers in devising usable scales. Examples from the authors' own research are used to illustrate some of the steps in the process.

This study examined perceived failure rates, reasons for failure, and desirable attributes for expatriate managers in the lodging industry. The survey results showed that perceived failure rates in the lodging sector are similar to those in other industries. However, the reasons for failure and the attributes required for hotel-management success abroad appear to be particular to the industry. Personal, family, and work-related issues may contribute to expatriate failure. People skills, adaptability, flexibility, and emotional maturity are the most desirable attributes for expatriate managers. The results suggest that comprehensive cross-cultural training may be an effective way to reduce expatriate failure and enhance success.

The influence of factors beyond the immediate training context only recently has been considered in research on training effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the work environment on pretraining motivation, and the subsequent impact of pretraining motivation on two training effectiveness criteria: knowledge acquisition and training reactions. Using data collected from two foodservice safety training programs, the results from correlation and regression analyses showed that trainee perceptions about managerial support for training, as well as perceptions about the availability of equipment necessary to utilize training, had a direct influence on pretraining motivation. The results also showed that pretraining motivation was directly related to knowledge acquisition and positive reactions to training.

Although training is widely acknowledged to be essential to effective hospitality operations, the specific combination of factors that makes training effective embodies a mystery. Human-resources managers examine training programs to see whether those programs are based on properly assessed needs, how those needs have been addressed, and whether employees are able to integrate their newly acquired learning into the workplace. Although those aspects of training—needs assessment, implementation, and follow through—are essential to the determination of training's effectiveness, those three factors alone do not tell the entire story. Instead, external factors play a substantial role in the effectiveness of training programs. Specifically, employees' individual characteristics, such as motivation, attitude, and basic ability, affect a training program's potential success. The work environment is also a major factor, particularly the characteristics of the job, social networks, corporate culture, and appraisal and reward systems. Taking into account the external factors along with the traditional measures of training effectiveness, a manager can begin to assess how well a training program is performing and determine what changes will make it more effective.

In recent years, the hospitality industry has undergone major changes both within the industry and in its operating environment. Researchers have posited that in an environment of change, as descri...

Transformational leadership is a way to convey to employees where the organization is going and their role in that journey. Transformational leaders in this study demonstrated a clear sense of direction, emphasized organizational objectives and their followers' needs, displayed a strong sense of values and ethics, created high standards, and served as an example for others to follow. Such executives are viewed as effective by both peers and subordinates, and as possessing the courage to foster an environment of growth and development.

The high incidence of expatriate U.S. managers' being unable or unwilling to complete their overseas assignments suggests that more needs to be done to prepare those managers and their families.