The hospitality Industry from a scientific point of view, based on its own environmental characteristics, such as governmental guidelines regarding the industry, companies’ processes, and internal policies, forms an entity that affects its employees and that is affected by its employees.
This article will introduce some concepts that may cause the industry work stress, work overload, employees dissatisfaction, and a high turnover rate.
Role conflict and the concept of ambiguity are two of the causes, which are described as follows, the role owner perceives a task in their way and decides their own set of behaviors that may not satisfy the task requirements or the perceived task requirements of the role sender and that is what is generating ambiguity and friction (Üngüren and Arslan 2021) .
Such an aspect is correlated with the leadership style, one of the most common within the Hospitality Industry is despotic leadership, characterized as unscrupulous, information distorted, and corrupted (Albashiti, et al 2021) supporting elements of ambiguity and interpersonal tensions creation, suggesting that the employees’ intentions to accomplish a positive outcome are limited by these authoritative leadership styles.
This is the moment that triggers something that is called a downward spiral that may be manifested into withdrawal behaviors building on the already produced dissatisfaction, influenced by the corrupted despotic leadership style, which will lead to even more dysfunctional behaviors, that in long term will increase job dissatisfaction and turnover intentions.
Such a negative working environment influences employees’ creativity, morality, and job performance by producing negative coping mechanisms (Naseer et al, 2016).
Such a workplace generates psychological distress because of role conflict and ambiguity, that if maintained can lead to burnout, and in time to higher levels of depression plus a lower sense of belonging to the workplace (Ouyang et al, 2015) which can contribute to the turnover rates.
Possible solutions to high turnover rates, are factors related to job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Robinson, et al 2014), suggesting that increased levels of job satisfaction and organizational commitment will forecast lower intentions to leave.
Job satisfaction is influenced by employee job attitude, which is characterized by individual feelings, regarding their job. The feelings are associated with negative or positive emotions and are generated by the individuals’ value systems (Kim and Hwang 2015). Feelings then can be said as being extremely important in generating turnover intentions and operating straight at this level initially by avoiding negative feelings to arise, may, in theory, predict dissatisfaction.
An association between job embeddedness and intentions to leave was established, the relation was negative, revealing a link between work-community bonds and commitment to the organization, but it was inconclusive (Robinson et al, 2014). Suggesting that positive work relationships alone; even if they may influence factors such as role conflict, burnout, and work autonomy; these correlations alone are not sufficient to decrease dissatisfaction which may lead to the assumption that dissatisfaction can be caused by multiple interactions between the factors that create turnover antecedents which in my opinion are role ambiguity, role conflict, interpersonal tensions, negative coping mechanisms.
Research says that organizational commitment is influenced by an array of factors, like the company’s assistance to employees’ needs, the company chain of command, how much their superiors are supporting them, family support/conflict, regarding their jobs, tasks’ signification, and character, work positive relationships, job motivation, and performance (Arasli et al., 2017).
When an employee is highly committed to his/her company, that comes from the alignment of their own goals and values with the organizational goals and values, which increases job satisfaction (Kim and Brymer, 2011) servant leadership styles and mentoring and coaching approaches can train the individual in achieving such a new mindset that will allow them to navigate easier through the ambiguity of the work environment.
That is why such an approach as mentoring and coaching, specifically evolutionary coaching, often called life coaching, that is a systematized, structured approach, assisting individuals in operating adjustments in their lives, setting and reaching objectives with the purpose of enhancing their well-being (Kim, et al 2015) can lead to a higher organizational commitment, by aligning companies goals with the individual intrinsic interests will create an internal motivation which is having a higher rate of sustainability in the long term (Schneider et al., 2011) than the authoritative leadership styles.
Furthermore, this phenomenon can easily be explained by what is called single and double-loop learning styles. The single-loop learning style is specific to the directive, authoritative leadership styles which are characterized by downstream instructions transmitted from the top to the bottom of the chain of command. While the assertive leadership style is introducing a new dimension of learning, which is the generation of new knowledge based on the needs of the employees, that theoretically can lead to the acquisition of new skills that can be used to cope with the environment and that can be achieved by efficient training based on mentoring an coaching approaches that use assertive leadership style elements.
This blog will investigate issues like staff wellbeing , retention rate in the Hospitality Industry and will analyse based on scientific arguments what are the solutions to solve such issues on long term.