This study develops and tests a research model which investigates the impact of workload and supervisor support on emotional exhaustion and analyzes its consequences for critical employee and job-related outcomes, such as affective organizational commitment, intention to leave, and the quality of service performance. A survey instrument was used to collect data from 162 hotel employees in Poland. The study findings confirmed that workload and supervisor support are both significant antecedents of emotional exhaustion, which, in turn, exerts a significant impact on hotel employees’ leaving intention that reduces the quality of service performance. This study also offers useful implications including trainings and emotional management courses to protect hotel employees from emotional exhaustion and maintain committed workforce who are likely to deliver high service quality.

Purpose: This study aims to examine the effects of individual and job-related characteristics on employees’ work engagement and its influence on their performance outcomes. This study develops and tests the research model where the impact of positive affectivity, polychronicity and task significance on employees’ work engagement is investigated, and its consequences for employees’ job performance are analyzed.Design/methodology/approach: The relationships between study constructs were tested using the structural equation modeling. Data were collected from 222 hotel contact employees from the Pomeranian Voivodeship, a tourist destination of northern Poland.Findings: The study findings confirmed that positive affectivity and polychronicity, as personality characteristics and task significance as a job characteristic exert a significant and positive impact on hotel employees’ work engagement, which in turn enhances the level of their job performance. Additionally, polychronicity was significantly related to hotel employees’ job performance. Of all the analyzed predictors, task significance appeared to be the strongest driver of hotel employees’ work engagement. A direct relationship between polychronicity and hotel employees’ job performance was also confirmed by this study.Practical implications: Hotel organizations are recommended to modify the standards of their recruitment and selection process and incorporate additional techniques to be more successful in hiring employees with an adequate personality profile (high in positive affectivity and polychronic tendency). The recruited suitable candidates should be guided effectively with appropriate human resource management practices, especially those that increase hotel employees’ experience of work meaningfulness. Therefore, they should be constantly assured, through a variety of management actions, about the influence and importance of their roles and the contribution to the service and organizational success.Originality/value: This study contributes to a better understanding of the relationships between personality and job characteristics among frontline hotel employees, extending the study results to the context of East-Central Europe, where, to the best of the author’s knowledge, studies on simultaneous effects of individual and job-related factors on hotel employees’ work engagement and its behavioral consequences are still limited.

Hospitality organizations which are increasingly operating internationally create real challenges for their employees and managers to interact and effectively work with people from different cultural environments. Many problems may relate to intercultural communication between managers and employees as well as between employees and hotel guests from different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, the issue of intercultural communication has recently had an increasing reach in the hospitality industry. Cultural awareness, sensitivity and understanding of cultural differences should be perceived as a critical issue for business success. Therefore, the following questions still need answers from both academics and the business: What kind of challenges does the hospitality industry face in view of the multicultural diversity of its markets? What kind of managers’ skills and abilities, particularly in the case of entry-level managers, are strongly needed today to manage effectively multicultural hospitality workforce? And how may educational programs influence intercultural competence development of tourism and hospitality students to interact effectively in a multicultural environment. The aim of the study is to show that cultural diversity of hotel employees and guests may create unique challenges of cross-cultural service encounters, which may provide an opportunity for service differentiation. The research problem is to find answers to the questions: how may the challenges that emerge from cross-cultural interactions become a source of hotel competitiveness and how may the educational process contribute to the intercultural competence development, to recruit employees who will be able to operate successfully in a multicultural hospitality environment. The study problem is discussed in the context of literature review and the previous research conducted in the hospitality setting. Implications for practitioners and educators are also delivered.

The present study analyzes consumers' and managers' perception of service quality in hotels in Northern Poland. The article aims to find out existence of gaps or their lack between the expected and perceived hotel service quality. The authors undertake an attempt to identify the main reasons for the discrepancy between customers' expectations and their perception of the service quality and show the most urgent tasks facing proactive managers to improve the quality of services they offer. A modified version of the SERVQUAL tool was employed to assess the quality of hotel services. Data were collected from a sample of guests and managers in 25 hotels of different categories (from one- to five-star hotels). A perceptual map and statistical methods were used in a process of analysis. This study should help managers to enhance their understanding of customers' expectations of service quality and show how to identify the priorities of service quality improvement in the hotel sector. Further research is suggested in the field of innovation in the hotel sector to obtain customer satisfaction and gain competitive advantage on the growing global tourist market. A background for the research can be found in the model of innovative changes in the hotel services; innovation of both a hotel product and the process of service delivery has been suggested as a subject for future research.

Publication made available by Lower Silesian Digital Library

Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation