Abstract
To overcome the challenges of the contemporary business environment, tourism businesses must implement transformative changes in their human resource management. Acquiring appropriate skills and attitudes through in-house education and training programs is crucial for employees to adapt to these changes. However, there are forces within businesses that prevent employees from participating in education and training programs. To overcome these forces, tourism businesses should reinforce countervailing forces to motivate employees to learn. This chapter uses force field analysis to highlight the motivation and strategies that can play a role in strengthening the willingness of tourism business's employees to learn while overcoming the forces that reinforce their refusal to participate in in-house training. The chapter provides a new codification of earlier research on the motivation for learning, facilitating managers of tourism businesses to make decisions regarding human resources training.
Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management for Complex Work Environments
TopIntroduction
The combined effect of successive crises (financial, immigration and Covid-19) (Kakarougkas et al., 2023a; Matanzima & Nhiwatiwa, 2022; Ivanov & Stavrinoudis, 2018; Tsartas et al., 2019) with the rapid technological developments (robotics, artificial intelligence, etc.) (Ozdemir et al., 2023; Pencarelli, 2020) and global geopolitical developments (war in Ukraine and the Middle East) (Kucher et al., 2023; Plzáková, & Smeral, 2022), have created a new socio-economic reality (Belias et al., 2024; Zerva et al., 2024; Belias et al., 2023; Belias et al., 2022b; Belias & Vasiliadis, 2022; Belias et al., 2021). Tourism businesses to respond to the challenges that this new reality creates, i.e., increase in operating costs, increase in the turnover of human resources (HR), change in labor relations and others (Balli et al., 2022; Pappas, 2018; Stavrinoudis et al., 2022), implement transformative changes in the way they operate (Bangso et al., 2023; Herédia-Colaço, & Rodrigues, 2021). In the case of tourism businesses, all these changes are directly linked to their HR and their ability to acquire the appropriate skills and attitudes through their participation in in-house education training programs (Belias et al., 2020; Fauzi, 2023).
In every tourism business, forces are often activated that prevent employees from participating in education-training programs offered by the companies and limit the effective implementation of these programs due to intra-company, often inherent, weaknesses (Huang, 2015; Robinson, 2020). Alshammari (2020) and Liebowitz (2019) argue that to overcome the forces that hinder the implementation of in-house training programs, businesses, including tourism ones, must strengthen countervailing forces of removing barriers, thus strengthening the will of employees towards training by providing appropriate motivation for learning at the individual, team, and business level (Park & Kim, 2018; Kakarougkas et al., 2023).
This chapter aims to highlight in a coded way, making use of Force Field Analysis (FFA) (Mak & Chang, 2019; Martín-Rios & Ciobanu, 2019), the motivation and the strategies that can play the role of the forces in the context of tourism business, that will strengthen employees' willingness to learn at the expense of the forces that reinforce their refusal to participate in in-house training initiatives. To achieve this goal, this chapter follows the method of content analysis (Kleinheksel et al., 2020) of the findings of previous scientific research in the fields of FFA, Motivation, and Barriers to Organisational Learning (OL) and Organisational Knowledge (OK).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Organisational Learning: A process of acquiring new Organisational Knowledge and skills and changing (one's) capabilities.
Learning Barriers: These can be defined as factors that prevent the dissemination of OK or make it challenging to organize in-house training activities.
Field Analysis: This states that a person's behavior results from psychological forces determined by his perceptual or psychological environment. Changes in these forces lead to changes in a person's behavior.
Pro-Learning Strategies: These will strengthen the effect of the driving forces (i.e., the motivation for learning) while at the same time reducing or eliminating the restraining forces (i.e., the obstacles to learning).
Force Field Analysis: This aims to help identify actions that will lead to achieving organizational goals by identifying forces that support their achievement. In the context of FFA, a force corresponds to a factor that includes organizational elements, inside or outside an enterprise, that act either for or against any business goal and, because of that, determine the existing or future state of the business in question.
Motivation for Learning: This can be defined as an internal process, starting from a cognitive requirement or deficiency of an individual or a group of individuals, which aims to cover this deficiency or requirement at a physiological/material and psychological/intangible level through a positive outcome/reward or prize.
A New Socio-Economic Reality: This reality is formulated due a) to the combined effect of successive crises (financial, immigration, and COVID-19), b) the rapid technological developments (robotics, artificial intelligence, etc.), and c) global geopolitical developments (war in Ukraine and the Middle East).
Organizational Knowledge: A fluid mixture containing norms, rules, behavior patterns, experiences, values, contextual information, and insight.