Introduction
The significance of tourism and hospitality jobs in both developed and developing nations is demonstrated by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), which recommends that tourism and hospitality-linked operations account for more than 250 million jobs or 8.8% of jobs worldwide.1
However, while the number of jobs is not questionable, the quality of majority of such positions is of enormous concern to professionals and decision-makers alike.
In spite of the rhetoric of decision-makers and corporate managers that people are the sector’s most critical asset, several remain doubtful that this perception is developed through pragmatic research.2
McGunnigle and Jameson identify the problems to live and work in a service sector which, according to them, is categorised by two types of hospitality careers: large group of low-talent, low-income careers and a lesser group of high-talent, high-pay careers, with a small number of careers being in the middle of such two extremes.3
This paper focuses on tackling a number of the critical human resource (HR) concerns that must be addressed so that companies can retain this environment.
To do so the paper will critically review a number of the issues which make people to portray tourism and hospitality job as generally dissatisfying and unpleasing, while as well taking into account examples of best practise, significant strategy reactions and theories of human resource management which may provide evidence for higher optimism in the manner individuals are organised within the tourism and hospitality sector in Australia.
Tourism and Hospitality Industry
To recognise the variety both of the diversity of sub-industries and kinds of careers the tourism and hospitality sector in Australia is likely to create, this paper cannot take into account all of these elements in detail.
In fact, more is known regarding jobs in a number of sub-industries than others. For instance, the business-related hospitality sector including restaurants and bars, hotels, nightclubs and pubs is the biggest sub-industry with roughly 73% of workers in Australia.4
Predictably, then, the business-related hospitality sector is well served with widespread studies about the type of jobs and human resource management approaches. In contrast, little has been studied about the service sector or the nature of human resource management in hospitality sector.
As a result many of the illustrations drawn on in this paper are from the business-related hospitality sector, even though, where possible, examples of managerial practise from service and hospitality companies are as well utilised.
Finally, the key objective of the paper is that of attempting to understand the potentially varied job experience of people working in the so-called tourism and hospitality sectors.
Hence, how do the experiences of airline attendants vary from that of cooks in the kitchen in an emerging hotel to receptionists in the front desk of a global restaurant or to tour representatives working on a 24/7 shift?
Within the Australia hospitality, holiday, travel and tourism industry 77% of organisations absorb less than 10 individuals and 52% less than 5.
Non-homogeneity is in addition viewed in association with the manner that companies utilise varying strategies to competitive advantage, dependent on which kind of market the organisations operate in.
For instance, commercial airlines in the airline sub-sector are likely to have extremely diverse approaches to human resource management in relation to low-cost carriers.5
The same is real for the service industry, which may vary from first class and luxury restaurants offering exaggerated 24/7 hour service to the more basic comforts of a bed and breakfast service; from fast food hotel to Michelin starred hotel.
In turn, the employment offered by such different companies demand an array of talents and features from those workers interacting with clients, which again will determine human resource approaches like staffing and selection and development.
Current HR Practises
The International Labour Organisation in their comprehensive study about the worldwide tourism and hospitality sector offers facts that imply that the sector internationally is greatly dependent on what Canny has described as alleged marginal employees like young employees, casual workers, women, students, and comparatively high percentages of migrant and part-time employees.
For instance, in Australia women represent approximately 59% of the broader hospitality and tourism labour force.6
More particularly, the tourism sub-industry is indicative of the broader industry in having a higher fraction of part-timers (53%) than most other sectors with the all sector fraction being 26%. young individuals are in addition prominent in the tourism and hospitality industry.
For instance, 38% of the total Australia labour force is below 25 years and 59% below 35 years. Associated with this last aspect an important component of the tourism and hospitality labour force comprises of student, part-time and migrant employees.
Students are an increasingly critical part of the employment market for tourism and hospitality companies.7 They are ready to work for low salaries and be flexible in their working trends, generating what Lindsay and McQuaid describe as a twist of fate between workers and employers.
Hence, almost 75% of all students who are hired in the commercial hospitality organisations and the enormous proportion of students who are working do so in front-desk jobs like waiters/waitresses, sales people and check out assistants.
The number of ethnic minority employees within the broader tourism and hospitality industry is 12%, a little greater than the all sector percentage of 10.5%.
Regarding skills only 13% of workers in tourism and hospitality possess a degree or similar qualification compared to a general sector percentage of 30%, with 16% of the labour force possessing no skills compared to 12% of the total labour force.8
Having briefly considered the nature of the tourism and hospitality sector and the features of its labour force focus now shift to understanding human resource management and the increasingly significant function it is expected to perform in organisational success.
HRM within Organisations
There have been several efforts to describe what precisely human resource management might be and in fact Jollife and Farnsworth identify that it is an issue of significant academic research and that, finally, there is no consensus on what human resource management means.9
Evidently what the above argument points to is that human resource management implies different things to different individuals, dependent on whether they are managers, employees or academics and there is no one description that will sufficiently capture the possible intricacy of the subject.
That said, for the objectives of this paper it will recognise human resource management as being mostly about how companies seek to treat their workers in the search of organisational success.
Hence, human resource management is a unique approach to workforce management which focuses on achieving competitive edge via the strategic employment of an exceedingly dedicated and competent labour force, utilising an integrated collection of cultural, organisational and staff approaches.
The challenge of human resource management then would appear to be how to hire, deploy, establish, remunerate and encourage employees, leading to them being an origin of competitive edge. Some of the HRM roles include: staffing and selection, retention, and career development.10
Hard vs. Soft
In addition to offering the precise description above, Price as well presented one of the most basic and most tolerating efforts of recognising diverse approaches to human resource management.
Such diverse approaches are captured through the concept of hard and soft human resource management, each of which is now briefly defined. The hard approach is perceived to be a fundamental and financially sound approach to human resource management.
In this perspective HRM approaches are driven by tactical contemplation to achieve competitive edge, optimising management whilst attaining the lowest possible labour expenditure. Such approach is quantitative and labour is an input, the same as any other.
The emphasis is on human resource management. In contrast the soft approach is viewed to be much more on implementing a developmental and humanistic approach to human resource management.
As an outcome a company’s HRM approach is expected to be more consensual and reliant on an elevated degree of organisational loyalty to workers, which is anticipated to result in shared loyalty from workers, elevated confidence and improved production.
Workers are perceived as being positive, able to being developed and worthy of confidence and teamwork. This strategy aims at human resource management.
What hard and soft strategies to human resource management suggest is that organisations will change their HRM approaches.11
Soft approach and competitive advantage
One of the most influential efforts of developing an approach that recognised the need for a link between human resource management and the competitive approach was that presented by McGunnigle and Jameson.
McGunnigle and Jameson generated a series of elements of required role characteristics that enabled the fit between human resource management and competitive approach to be created.
The kind of required role elements within McGunnigle and Jameson’s system was dependent on the overall soft approaches that a company could utilise with a view of seeking competitive advantage and the human resource management strategies utilised to maintain this.12
First, there is an originality approach, where companies seek to establish services and products that are competitive, such that the concentration here is on organisations providing something novel and diverse.
Companies utilising soft strategy seek to establish a milieu where novelty is enabled to prevail. As a result, the worker required role feature in this context is defined by behaviours such as readiness to bear ambiguity and irregularity, the need to be innovative and threat taking.
Given such features the nature of human resource management approach emerging from this strategy is dependent on having an enormous number of greatly capable people who are expected to enjoy high degrees of democracy.
This support for the role of soft human resource management approaches fitting the companies own tactically described market portion to establish a fit between the operative fields of marketing, activities and human resource management is in addition evident in the work of Canny.
Canny describes four fundamental standards within which service companies can be potentially located. The main aspect which comes out from the work of Canny is the potential interaction between the soft approach of human resource management which best fits the organisation and the service activity kind utilised by the organisation.13
Discussion
As the paper has already noted hospitality and tourism in Australia is expected to provide great diversity in terms of human resource management strategies and practises and it would be good to consider that these are seldom awful.
Facts equally show that though that this is not at all times the case. To recognise this issue, this paper focuses on developing a rational account of how organisations within tourism and hospitality create and apply their human resource standards and policies and what such a rational view will mean for workers.
Conclusion
This paper recognised the significance of hospitality and tourism as a job industry in Australia. The industry offers an outsized and different number of careers and will be significant for future career development throughout the developed and developing nations.
While the number of careers created by the hospitality and tourism sector is inspiring there are a number of issues regarding the nature of job experience in the industry.
Underlying this discussion are some theories of human resource management which offer an outline in which to locate the approaches utilised in the tourism and hospitality companies.
Works Cited
Boxall, P, & J Purcell, ‘Strategic human resource management: where have we come from and where we should be going’, International Journal of Management Reviews, vol. 2, no. 2, 2009, pp. 183–203.
Canny, A, ‘Flexible labour: the growth of student employment in the UK’, Journal of Education and Work, vol. 15, no. 3, 2007, pp. 277–301.
Jollife, L, & R Farnsworth, ‘Seasonality in tourism employment: human resources challenges’, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, vol. 15, no. 6, 2008, pp. 312–316.
Lindsay, C, & R McQuaid, ‘Avoiding the McJobs: unemployed job seekers and attitudes to service work’, Employment and Society, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006, pp. 297-319.
McGunnigle, P, & S Jameson, ‘HRM in UK hotels: a focus on commitment’, Employee Relations, vo. 22, no. 4, 2010, pp. 403–422.
Nickson, D, & R Wood, ‘HRM in the hotel industry: a comment and response’, Human Resource Management Journal, vol. 10, no. 4, 2011, pp. 88–90.
Price, L, ‘Poor personnel practise in the hotel and catering industry – does it matter?’, Human Resource Management Journal, vol. 4, no. 4, 2011, pp. 44–62.
Footnotes
1 D Nickson & R Wood, ‘HRM in the hotel industry: a comment and response’, Human Resource Management Journal, vol. 10, no. 4, 2011, p. 89.
2 L Price, ‘Poor personnel practise in the hotel and catering industry – does it matter?’, Human Resource Management Journal, vol. 4, no. 4, 2011, p. 45.
3 P McGunnigle & S Jameson, ‘HRM in UK hotels: a focus on commitment’, Employee Relations, vo. 22, no. 4, 2010, p. 415.
4 P Boxall & J Purcell, ‘Strategic human resource management: where have we come from and where we should be going’, International Journal of Management Reviews, vol. 2, no. 2, 2009, p. 186.
5 P McGunnigle & S Jameson, ‘HRM in UK hotels: a focus on commitment’, Employee Relations, vo. 22, no. 4, 2010, p. 419
6 A Canny, ‘Flexible labour: the growth of student employment in the UK’, Journal of Education and Work, vol. 15, no. 3, 2007, p. 280.
7 L Price, ‘Poor personnel practise in the hotel and catering industry – does it matter?’, Human Resource Management Journal, vol. 4, no. 4, 2011, p. 56.
8 C Lindsay & R McQuaid, ‘Avoiding the McJobs: unemployed job seekers and attitudes to service work’, Employment and Society, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006, p. 299.
9 L Jollife & R Farnsworth, ‘Seasonality in tourism employment: human resources challenges’, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, vol. 15, no. 6, 2008, p. 317.
10 P Boxall & J Purcell, ‘Strategic human resource management: where have we come from and where we should be going’, International Journal of Management Reviews, vol. 2, no. 2, 2009, p. 188.
11 L Price, ‘Poor personnel practise in the hotel and catering industry – does it matter?’, Human Resource Management Journal, vol. 4, no. 4, 2011, p. 48.
12 P McGunnigle & S Jameson, ‘HRM in UK hotels: a focus on commitment’, Employee Relations, vo. 22, no. 4, 2010, p. 419.
13 A Canny, ‘Flexible labour: the growth of student employment in the UK’, Journal of Education and Work, vol. 15, no. 3, 2007, p. 299.