Hotel Management and Service Improvement Through Job Embeddedness

Casa del Mar

Hotels and resorts hire a higher percentage of service employees and are constantly seeking ways to improve on service delivery. To create seamless service it is necessary to have stronger performance the moment the bell person takes the customers bags to the server who delivers their order. Research in job embeddedness helps to highlight how training, empowerment, and rewards can lead to higher levels of performance by service workers. Yet this research also indicates that rewards and training may not be the most important consideration.

Job embeddedness is a concept that refers to, “the combined forces that keep a person from leaving his or her job” (Yao et. al, 2004,pp. 159). This concept can include compensation, organizational fit, personal abilities, management style, etc… The concept is closely associated with employee satisfaction in terms of how and what employees feel about the organization.

Turnover rates and poor performance can be expensive for organizations. In many low skilled positions turnover rates can be excessive costing both time and money for recruiting and training. Higher absenteeism, resistant behavior, and poor customer relations can take a toll on a company’s profit margins. Understanding and improving upon job embeddedness will also improve upon the human relations and performance within the organization.

Job embeddedness theory indicates that when there are strong links and proper organization fit between employees and organizations, employees will be more motivated to display strong performance (Lee, et. al, 2004). This performance has a whole range of important improvements for organizations. Consider a few of the following:

-Stronger service and service recovery.

-Lower turnover rates and improvement costs.

-Less resistant behavior.

-Higher human efficiency and performance.

-Higher customer return rates and impression.

As you look through the list above you might be able to figure that each of the costs are associated with poor employee embeddedness. When customers have a poor impression of the organization they are not likely to return and this can limit present and future sales. Resistant behavior and poor performance can cause mistakes within the workplace and an inability to improve upon operations as employees avoid change and direction. As organizations are socio-economic groups these concepts are central to a well-run business.

According to a study conducted by Karatepel and Karadas (2012) job embeddedness has a huge factor on organizational success. They collected sample data from 7 hotels ranked in the four and five star resort area of Poiana Brasov region of Romania. All participants were direct front-line workers hired as desk agents, food servers, door attendance, guest representatives, bell attendants and bar tenders.

-Training, empowerment, and rewards enhance front-line employee job embeddedness.

-Association of empowerment and service recovery.

-No association between training and service recovery.

-Training and empowerment increase extra-role behavior.

-No association of rewards and extra-role behavior.

-Job embeddedness as a concept increase service performance.

Analysis:

The concept of job embeddedness entails the perception of employees and their positions within the organization. The study has encouraged a better understanding of how training, empowerment, and rewards can improve upon this perception and increase overall performance. Since training was not associated with service recovery while empowerment was associated employees should feel free to find unique ways to meet customer needs. This would be difficult if were not allowed to go outside necessary procedures when necessary. Furthermore, since training and empowerment also increased extra-role behaviors of employees it would be a beneficial focus of management leaders. Together the concepts of training, rewards, and empowerment enhance embeddedness which has a tangible result on extra-role behavior and overall service recovery.

Lee, T. , Mitchell, T., Sablynski, C.,  Burton, J.& Holtom, B.(2004). The effects of job embeddedness on organizational citizenship, job performance, volitional absences, and voluntary turnover, Academy of Management Journal 47(5): 711–722.

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Karatepel, O. & Karadas, G. (2012). The effect of management commitment to service quality on job embeddedness and performance outcomes. Journal of Business Economics and Management, 13 (4).

Developing Strong Socialization Processes in the Workplace

New employees are often confused about the expectations and requirements of their new positions and the organization where they work. These uncertainties result in feelings of stress, confusion, anxiety, awkwardness and uneasiness (Louis, 1980). Such feelings create insecure inaction that begins to clear up the longer the employee is employed. Yet managers can speed up the socialization process by developing stronger communication networks and transference of information through a proper socialization process.

One of the first things new employees look for to clear up this confusion is a point of reference. This typically is the person they are first introduced. Such points of reference are based upon interpersonal communication and the information they can secure through the work network. This point of reference is fostered from another employee, organizational information, or their managers (Barge & Schlueter, 2004).

It is important for managers to understand precisely what points of reference employees are being offered or most likely to attach themselves. For example, if an employee receives one day of training and then left to their work group to understand their environment they will use available positive and negative information to make their conclusions. It is the constant communication between managers and employees that helps foster alternative points of reference that further more appropriate impressions and final conclusions.

The totality of positive and negative impressions can impact the success of the employee and cause low productivity and higher turnover rates into the future. During the initial organizational entry period both formal and informal messages combine to either reinforce engagement or encourage disengagement from the organization (Altman, Visel & Brown, 1981). Strong orientations and constant communication can develop higher levels of engagement that allow the integration of the self with the organizational expectations.

The very first months will create attitudes, behavior, and knowledge that determine employee level engagement with company expectations (Allen, 2006). After these first impressions are created it becomes extremely difficult to change the course of thinking without higher levels of intervention. Such impressions make their way throughout the employees’ method of thinking creating additional justifications why their assumptions are true. Competing information is often ignored due to high levels of selection attention that don’t fit with initial assumptions.

The initial signs of uncertainty most employees feel when entering the workplace is the ideal time to open up communication lines and socialize employees to positive workplace expectations. This is the time when information seeking behavior increases (Berger and Calabrese, 1975). In such a situation it is beneficial to offer the needed information in order to both reduce this information seeking behavior as well as limit the cost of initial lackluster performance throughout the socialization process. 

Managers who engage their employees through positive communication and expectation building have the capacity to create higher levels of performance with less wasted time and disciplinary distractions that impact the department long into the future. Proactive management should consider the benefits of spending additional time at the beginning of the socialization process to ensure that initial impressions are strong so that future information is filtered and categorized appropriately by the employee. A little extra effort in the beginning can create stronger group development in the future once a general culture has been developed.

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