Coping with Stress: How Hotel Employees Fight to Work

Abstract

Working in hospitality establishments involves high levels of stress, partially due to the anti-social shift rotations and the high levels of emotional labor needed. Unmanaged stress often leads to psychological and even physical diseases, which harm both individual career development and hotel operations. Thus, it is of great importance to identify effective stress coping strategies to maintain a sustainable hotel work force. Stress coping behavior varies among different demographics and generations. Commonly used stress coping scales were established almost 40 years ago, and under the context of daily events, and may not be applicable in today’s hospitality context. Thus, this study was designed to investigate effective stress coping strategies among today’s hotel employees. Data were collected from 470 hotel employees in 37 cities in China. The results identified 12 effective coping strategies that fell under three dimensions: distraction, sharing, and self-indulgence. The findings contribute to scholarly knowledge of stress coping. Managerial implications are also discussed.

تأثیر استراتیجیات المواجهة على الإجهاد المهنی وانعكاسه على نیة دوران الموظفین فی الفنادق: الدور المعدل للتبادل الاجتماعی

“…Furthermore, encouraging coworkers and managers can make it easier for employees to complete their tasks, potentially mitigating the negative effects of heavy workloads (Pomakiet al, 2010). They can support employees in developing adaptive coping skills, which can result in a more productive and stress-free work environment (Ma et al, 2021). Hotels are known for being high-workload environments, particularly for front-line staff who must be customerfocused, handle a variety of requests from customers, and address disgruntled ones.…”

“…Because it is by definition a customer-focused company, the hospitality sector is more stressful than most other sectors for its personnel (Shi et al, 2022). Poor working conditions, long hours, low pay, work overload, frequent rotations, working unsocial hours, and a variety of shifts, such as weekend, night, or holiday shifts, are characteristics of occupations in the hospitality business (Min et al, 2015;Kahar & Wee, 2020;Ma et al, 2021;Ahmad et al, 2021). The most significant drivers of stress in the hotel sector have been noted in previous studies, including job insecurity, inadequate pay, feeling badly managed with few resources, work-life balance, and interacting with clients (Yousaf et al, 2020;Ahmad et al, 2021).…”

“…Frontline hospitality industry personnel may manage stress, maintain their job happiness, engage in their occupations, and have less turnover intention when they receive high levels of social support from their supervisors and coworkers (Yousaf et al, 2020). They can support employees in developing adaptive coping skills, which can result in a more productive and stress-free work environment (Ma et al, 2021). Moreover, found that social support can assist employees in dealing with everyday job stress and lessen their turnover intentions.…”

“…The hospitality sector is more stressful than most other sectors for its personnel (Shi et al, 2022). Poor working conditions, long hours, low pay, work overload, frequent rotations, working unsocial hours, and a variety of shifts are characteristics of jobs in the hospitality business (Min et al, 2015;Kahar & Wee, 2020;Ma et al, 2021;Ahmad et al, 2021). Since the first investigations, coping has been researched along with occupational stress.…”

Short-time Work, Redundancies, and Changing Work Environment: The Hospitality Sector During COVID-19

“…Xiang et al 2022). Other documented risk factors relating to the psychosocial work environment include stress due to high levels of emotional labor, frequent rotations with anti-social working hours (Ma et al 2021), problems with leadership, poor scheduling and organization, as well as with a risk to be exposed to threats and violence (HRF 2017).…”