This narrative evaluates the dimensions associated with job satisfaction for hotel employees in the 21st century. The extensive literature review and meta-analysis explores the various facets encompassing job satisfaction and job insecurity including depersonalization, stress, burnout, and turnover intention for hotel workers with a focus on front desk employees. The analysis reviews the impact of work environment and work culture as it correlates to job satisfaction and job insecurity, determining an engaging, empowering, and fun culture often offsets negative emotions associated with front desk work at a hotel. The chapter also provides an assessment of how an employee receiving negative career feedback can correlate with negative career outcomes, and how leadership can utilize career pathways to increase employee retention. Finally, the chapter identifies practical tactics to utilize within a hotel operation to reduce voluntary separation by offering targeted benefit packages while also keeping employes engaged, satisfied, and excited about their roles.
TopIntroduction: Understanding Job Insecurity In The 21St Century
In literature, much has been discussed around what causes job insecurity but additional insight into the nature of job insecurity and how it influences employee behavior is needed. While the 21st century has seen a significant volume of external crises that impact work, the truth is that disruption of this nature has been occurring for a much longer period of time. Since the late 1970s, economic recessions, industrial restructuring, technological change, and intensified global competition have dramatically changed the nature of work (Howard, 1995). While some of the intensities of these changes have been lost to generational paradigms, it is important to understand the phenomenon of job insecurity beyond current events, as significant as those may appear to be at the time they occur (Sverke & Hellgren, 2002).
Job insecurity only occurs in the case of involuntary job loss (Greenhalgh & Rosenblatt, 1984). Hartley, Jacobson, Klandermans, & Van Vuuren (1991) argued that the construct, in its most general sense, reflects the discrepancy between the level of security a person experiences and the level he or she prefers. It would be meaningful to make a distinction between at least two different aspects of job insecurity: Quantitative and qualitative insecurity. Quantitative job insecurity is similar to the global conceptualizations of the construct. Qualitative job insecurity pertains to perceptions of potential loss of quality in the employment relationship, such as deterioration of working conditions, demotion, lack of career opportunities, decreasing salary development, and concerns about person–organization fit in the future.
Long-term, ominous job insecurity is likely to have severe consequences for an employee’s overall life situation in that economic and other highly valued aspects of life will be perceived as threatened (Ashford, Lee, & Bobko, 1989; Hartley et al., 1991). Job insecurity is associated with impaired well-being (Barling & Kelloway, 1996; Hartley et al., 1991; Jick, 1985). Physical health complaints, mental distress, and work-to-leisure carry-over increase proportionately with the level of job insecurity (e.g. Ashford et al., 1989; Lim, 1996; Mattiasson, Lindgarde, Nilsson, & Theorell, 1990; Noer, 1993)
Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, millions of workers have been displaced while others have become involuntarily part-time unemployed, hired on temporary employment contracts, or experienced “a fundamental and involuntary change in their sets of beliefs about the employing organization and their place in it” (Jacobson, 1991, p. 2). For many employees, the changes in working life we have witnessed over the past two decades have caused feelings of insecurity concerning the nature and future existence of their jobs (Hartley, et. al., 1991). Individuals who once experienced safe and long-term employment now, to an increasingly larger extent, face insecure employment conditions (Roskies & Louis-Guerin, 1990).
As noted by several commentators (e.g. Gowing, Kraft, & Campbell Quick, 1998; Howard, 1995; Pfeffer, 1998; Rifkin, 1995), working life has been subject to dramatic change over past decades. In this context, job insecurity has emerged as an important construct. There are several reasons for this development: intensified global competition has forced organizations to cut production costs and become more flexible; periods of economic recession have led to widespread organizational closure with unemployment and growing insecurity in its wake; new technologies have paved the way for less labor intensive production and also restricted the employment alternatives of less skilled workers; the rapid industrial restructuring from manufacturing to service production has called into question employees’ view of the stability of their employers; and a belief in the market-driven economy has changed government policies and in many countries resulted in relaxations of employment legislation (Davy, Kinicki, & Scheck, 1997; Greenhalgh & Rosenblatt, 1984; Hartley et al., 1991; Sparrow, 1998).