I’ve been working in the Hospitality industry for more than sixteen years, and when I started, I took the decision based on my passion for cooking. During this time the industry worldwide suffered a series of changes, which I seized during my career, initially, I doubt my rationale for trying to do what everyone else was doing, just sweep under the carpet ,and when too much dust has been accumulated under that carpet just leave the place and starting again, over and over.
Until that becomes too tiring, and instead of pretending that everything in the industry is just fine I started my own research trying to understand why, I ,and a huge number of the Hospitality Industry staff are so unhappy.
Like everyone else, I had no idea of why I am I feeling dissatisfied, but what triggered my attention was that I knew for sure that I was highly satisfied with my job during the first years, what then happen, what changed?
During many hours of work, the concepts behind my dissatisfaction started to come up, such as what happens when your diving alongside an iceberg, the more you dive, the more you discover that that block of ice is even bigger under the water than outside the water.
This article will define at an introductory level some concepts that contribute to job dissatisfaction within the Hospitality Industry and reveal the possible reasons why is that happening.
Let’s first talk about that foggy sensation that appears sometimes during the busy hours of the service, especially on weekends, if you are working in the Industry BOH or FOH, you definitely know what I am talking about. Where is that coming from? Studies are defining this feeling as role ambiguity, but what is role ambiguity?
Simplified, sounds like that, there is a role sender, for example, a superior, that delegate a task, providing vague information about the task; did that sounds familiar? Then due to the vague information given to perform the task, or role given, in many cases the outcomes do not fulfil the expectations of the role sender; the person that is delegating the task; this single aspect can be analysed from the perspective of many disciplines like sociology, cognitive behavioural sciences, and so on. But this article will just introduce some terms, and not provide in-depth analysis.
Returning to the definition once the person that performs the role seizing that is not satisfying the expectations of the role sender; often a superior; creates pressure in the mind of the task performer (King & King, 1990) which will lead to conflict. Conflicts starting from role ambiguity are many in HI, especially in kitchens. Studies show that role ambiguity and extreme work overload are common stress causes in HI (Zohar,1994). Using the analogy of the iceberg this is just the moment when we start diving, observing the iceberg and its real size.
The stress generated by role ambiguity is producing interpersonal conflicts which are responsible for 40–62% of work stress in a normal working day (O’Neill and Davis 2011).
Leading in turn to negative consequences for employees; affecting their, commitment, engagement, and job satisfaction; and companies; affecting the turnover rate due to stress, low job performance, intention to leave, and absenteeism.
Of course, causes are many and somehow connected, but role ambiguity may be the starting point of them. Due to its connection with dissatisfaction (Amilin, 2017). It took me a very long while to understand why this is so, many studies found that job satisfaction has an important effect on employee job performance (Borralha et al., 2016).
I couldn’t understand why I am not feeling the same as when I started. That is because conflict and role ambiguity has a negative effect on job satisfaction and job performance. The clearer a task or a role is, the higher the chances of a better performance of the task performer (Abramis,1994).
On the other hand, I remember that when used to like my job that feeling arose when my values and standards matched the job itself.
Later on, I found out that job satisfaction is one of the most researched topics within the companies of the Hospitality Industry, which means that the companies found the link between employee satisfaction and customers satisfaction, which was a well-known fact; at least when I started to work in the industry, many years after, once with the increasing size of the companies, this linkage between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction has been broken.
But this aspect will be explored in future articles.
Role ambiguity can be the beginning of the submerged portion of the iceberg and a concept that once understood can produce positive changes for both employees and companies.