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      The meaning of hospitality: do employees understand?

      , ,
      International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
      Emerald

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          Abstract

          Purpose

          This paper explores how hospitality frontline employees understand, interpret and practice “hospitality” in a hotel industry context.

          Design/methodology/approach

          Framed by interpretivist and phenomenological approaches a dual-stage semi-structured interview study design was conducted. A sample was drawn from hotel employees in Australia.

          Findings

          Findings support the proposition that the hospitality workforce tends to favor service management and service processes as the guiding paradigm. The essence of what it means to be hospitable, and the host-guest model, appears to be largely absent in practice.

          Research limitations/implications

          This paper contributes to a scarcity of literature exploring the understanding of hospitality, and how this understanding can translate into hospitable behavior, from the employee perspective. Our main implication is that service management terminology colonizes hospitality within a commercial context, while the essence of hospitality and the “hospitality” lexicon is concomitantly diminishing. The authors advocate for developing an inter-paradigmatic view of hospitality management.

          Practical implications

          While the study revealed that the majority of frontline hotel employees struggle with grasping and verbalizing their understandings and perceptions of the hospitality construct, although some acknowledged the importance of hospitality as being an integral component to service delivery. We identified consistent organizational practices and intrinsic employee traits that either enabled or obstructed hospitable behavior in hotel settings.

          Originality/value

          The study reveals tensions between the hospitality and service paradigms in hospitality literature and practice. We uncover hotel management practices that may help to conserve and foster the essence of hospitality in hospitality organizations.

          Related collections

          Most cited references59

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          Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing

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            Value co-creation in service logic: A critical analysis

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              Evaluating Service Encounters: The Effects of Physical Surroundings and Employee Responses

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                (View ORCID Profile)
                Journal
                International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
                IJCHM
                Emerald
                0959-6119
                May 08 2017
                May 08 2017
                : 29
                : 5
                : 1282-1304
                Article
                10.1108/IJCHM-11-2015-0667
                2eec4692-1faa-4ecd-a3ef-20a961c18c07
                © 2017

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