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This chapter draws on longitudinal case study research that focused on the experiences of hospitality employees working in a UK university who worked split shifts in the morning and evening while completing NVQ 2 and 3 apprenticeship training. We show how fragmented working time (Rubery, Grimshaw, Hebson, & Ugarte, 2015) rather than long hours led to the apprenticeship training further eroding an already blurred work-life boundary as workers were required to complete training activities in their non-work time which for them is during the middle of the day. We argue current depictions of the positive impact of training and development on low paid workers are decontextualized from the challenges and priorities of workers whose work-life interface is already complex because of working fragmented hours across the day. This is complicated even further by the dynamic and evolving experiences of workers themselves as they experience the highs and lows of combining paid work and training. We situate the research in the context of wider conceptual debates that call for a more inclusive approach to research on the work-life interface (Warren, 2021) and highlight implications for HR practitioners who want to offer such opportunities to low paid workers in sectors such as hospitality, while also recognizing the complex challenges such workers may face.

The focus of this chapter is firstly, to introduce the theoretical framework of an expressive approach that is suitable to research workers’ lived experience and secondly, to demonstrate through a practical example how this approach can be used to uncover ethical/moral concerns. In hospitality and tourism, research on ethics is still evolving; hence explorations of workers’ lived experience in search of ethical/moral concerns are limited. Perspectives of all stakeholders’ in the production and consumption of hospitality and tourism are necessary to advance knowledge in the field and strengthen the practice and pedagogy; but whilst representations of customers’ and managers’ perspectives abound that of workers are limited. Also, research approaches suitable to study lived experience are under explored. The expressive approach introduced herein draws on the philosophical tenets of phenomenology to portray the lived quality of the experience and hermeneutics to uncover its meanings and significance. This approach can textually expresses and evoke the lived quality of an experience using stories, poetry and metaphor. Its ability to evoke empathy through these media can be a powerful tool to persuade policy makers to care and attend to prevailing ethical/moral issues. The chapter begins by reviewing research into ethics in the context of hospitality and tourism practice and discussing the paucity of research representing women receptionists’ lived experiences concerning moral issues. It introduces an expressive research approach and provides a practical application of this approach in hospitality receptionists’ work. The chapter concludes by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the expressive approach.

This chapter examines how hospitality and tourism researchers can use ‘expressive text’ (or writing) to express the lived quality of an experience in order to ‘show what an experience is really like’ rather than ‘tell what it is like’. Expressive text refers to written language forms such as narrative, poetry and metaphor that can be used as tools in research to vividly represent the meaning and feeling conveyed in an experience. The expressive text-based approach to researching lived experience provides a textual link between experience and its expression. For this reason, it is especially useful when working with lived experience accounts of phenomenological and hermeneutic research.

The expressive text-based approach suggested here is still a relatively under explored arena within hospitality and tourism research. As a relatively under explored arena, the rich insightful knowledge that can be gained from understanding practitioner experience is rarely a central focus of scholarly writings about the workplace in hospitality and tourism contexts. However, in order to be fully appreciated as a discipline in its own right and to advance knowledge of the field, understanding the typical and significant attributes of hospitality and tourism work will be decidedly helpful.

One of the difficulties of working with lived experience accounts is finding a suitable research approach that helps to both retain the lived elements of the experience and ensure the rigour of the inquiry. An expressive text-based methodological framework that has a phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophical underpinning is argued to be suitable for this purpose. Therefore, the focus of this study is to discuss such a methodology and explain the reasons for its content, style and structure in researching lived experience. The approach that is proposed here consists of a five-tiered textually expressive methodology that is employed to contextualise, portray and interpret the lived experience meanings in order to understand the significance of the experience in relation to relevant discourses in hospitality and tourism studies, and to consider implications for policy and professional practice. The guiding questions of the five-tiered framework cover the following issues: (1) What is the context of the lived experience? (2) What is the lived experience of this practice like? (3) What is the meaning of this experience for the practitioner? (4) What is the significance of the experience in contributing to the advancement of knowledge within the field? (5) What are the implications for practice and professional development?

To illustrate uses of this methodology in research, the study here includes an example showing portrayals and interpretations of the typical and significant lived nature of hospitality reception work. This shows and communicates the full meaning of the episode, circumstances or situation. The chapter then concludes with some reflections on benefits as well as tensions in working within an expressive text-based phenomenological and hermeneutic framework.

This study aims to examine customer misbehaviour in the hospitality sector during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study draws on a cross-sectional survey of employees in the Scottish hospitality sector highlighting customer misbehaviour as a key concern during the pandemic. Prevalent types of abuse and harassment experienced are outlined along with employee and management responses to incidents of misbehaviour.

Verbal abuse and sexual harassment from customers are the most prevalent types of misbehaviour either experienced or witnessed by respondents. Customer misbehaviour is commonly thought of as “part of the job” and therefore “not a big deal”. Managers, largely, expect workers to tolerate abusive behaviours from customers and do not take reports of incidents seriously.

Transformational managers need to foster workplace well-being with a focus on physical and psychological safety. Recognition of the issue and greater support for victims are furthermore required at an industry level and on the policy front.

The research points to an uncomfortable reality in the service economy that needs to be confronted by society. It has, therefore, important implications for key stakeholders in ensuring fair, dignified and safe hospitality workplaces.

Customer misbehaviour is reportedly worsening in times of COVID-19 as demonstrated by this study. Despite rhetoric that abuse and harassment are not tolerated, dismissive attitudes from managers – who expect workers to tolerate abusive behaviour – and employee silence about incidents lead the authors to argue that the failure to acknowledge and address this issue constitutes a form of “social washing” in hospitality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between perceived dependence on tips and vulnerability to sexual harassment (SH) among hotel employees in Accra Metropolis, Ghana.

Within a cross-sectional research design, 583 employees from 55 hotels completed self-administered questionnaires. Descriptive statistics, χ² test of independence, Kruskal–Wallis test were used to analyse collected data.

Results of the study reveal that dependence on tips is related to SH vulnerability of food and beverage staff. Furthermore, dependence on tips engenders a perception of SH climate. Compared to guests and co-workers, supervisors were least identified as perpetrators of SH in hotel workspaces. Guests were responsible for unwanted sexual attention, whereas co-workers pose the greatest risk for gender harassment.

Hotel management should invest in the publication of educational materials such as leaflets and posters indicating unacceptability of inappropriate sexual behaviours.

This paper is one of the pioneers to have assessed the relationship between dependence on tips and perceived climate for SH as well as vulnerability to SH in a hotel context.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was declared as a pandemic since COVID-19's widespread outbreak and the hospitality industry has been the hardest hit due to lockdown. Consequently, hospitality workers are suffering from the negative aspects of mental health. In the event of such a crisis, this study aims to explore the link between unemployment and home isolation to the willingness to choose electronic consultation (e-consultation) by exploiting psychological ill-being and behavioural intention (BI) with marital status as a moderator.

A quantitative methodology is applied to primary data collected from 310 workers from the hospitality industry through an online survey.

Findings of this study suggest that the usage of the e-consultation service can be adopted using three levels. There are valid reasons to conclude unemployment and home isolation are linked to higher rates of psychological health behaviours, which can result in stigma, loss of self-worth and increased mortality. The adverse effect is higher for single individuals than for married people.

The study focussed on e-consultation, BI coupled with the Fishbein scale and a classification model for the prediction of willingness to choose e-consultation with the extension of Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB).

This study aims to investigate affective commitment (ACS) and leader–member exchange (LMX) as resources mitigating against burnout and counterproductive work behaviours (CWBs) in the hospitality sector, and examines the effect of zero-hour contracts on these relationships.

Through conservation of resources theory, this study tests a framework exploring ACS and LMX as resources against burnout and CWBs, using a data set of 260 frontline hospitality employees working in Ireland, considering zero-hour contracts as a moderator.

Findings indicate that burnout is associated with CWB, and ACS and LMX are resources against burnout and CWB. Furthermore, zero-hour contract perceptions moderate the resource effect of ACS and LMX. Yet, zero-hour contract perceptions do not moderate the relationship between burnout and CWB, indicating these employees may be caught in a resource-loss spiral.

This study proposes mechanisms to enhance resources against burnout, with specific strategies to support young employees who are more likely to experience burnout. As findings suggest unique negative impacts of burnout for employees on zero-hour contracts, this paper also provides guidance to support these vulnerable employees.

This study provides unique insights into hospitality employees’ ability to harness resources against burnout and CWB consequences of burnout. The results indicate that perceived precarity does not moderate these relationships, suggesting that burnout affects this cohort differently.

Hospitality workers are emotional labor workers because they must display appropriate emotions to their customers to provide outstanding service. Emotional intelligence (EI) helps employees regulate their emotions and display appropriate emotions, and hence should help hospitality workers provide outstanding service. However, the strength of the relationship between EI and hospitality workers’ job performance substantially varied across studies. Hence, the purpose of the present study is to clarify the mixed findings and to examine if EI can improve hospitality workers’ job performance.

A meta-analysis was performed to investigate the relationship between EI and hospitality workers’ job performance as well as the moderators which condition this relationship.

The present meta-analysis indicated that EI is positively related to hospitality workers’ job performance (ρ̅̂ = 0.54); the relationship between EI and hospitality workers’ job performance is stronger when the percentage of married subjects is low and in feminine cultures; and this relationship does not differ between male-dominated and female-dominated studies, across educational levels, between collectivistic and individualistic cultures, between low and high power distance cultures and between low and high uncertainty avoidance cultures.

This study uncovers theoretically important moderators that contribute to cross-cultural research, work–family literature and gender-related literature in hospitality research.

The present study builds a theoretical foundation and performs a meta-analysis to elucidate the relationship between EI and hospitality workers’ job performance and to identify the moderators which condition this relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships between work organisation, bullying and intention to leave (ITL) in the Australian hospitality industry, using pressure, disorganisation and regulatory failure (PDR) to measure work organisation.

Cross-sectional survey data were collected from 72 workers in Australian accommodation hotels. They were aged 20-65 years (M=38.26, SD=12.60) and 57.1 per cent were female. The proposed path model was tested with the Mplus (v.7) statistical package using Hayes’ (2009) procedure for mediation analysis.

There were positive bivariate correlations between all variables. The path model indicated that disorganisation and regulatory failure had direct positive associations with bullying. Financial pressure and bullying had direct positive associations with ITL.

The small sample may not be representative and the cross-sectional design and self-report data risk common method variance effects and preclude attributions of causality. Future studies should use more representative samples and longitudinal designs to address common method variance issues and facilitate causal inferences.

Bullying and turnover are significant problems in the hospitality industry, but the contribution of work organisation variables is poorly understood. The present study provides promising preliminary evidence on the potential role of PDR as an antecedent of both bullying and ITL.

This article aims to discuss issues related to service quality in the hotel industry. It highlights unique aspects of hotel work and the implications for service delivery, and discusses methods used to measure service quality and expectations.

Through an assessment of the extensive body of literature on quality service in general and within hotel contexts, some key themes emerge which have been explored in detail. Much of the analysis focuses on how the body of knowledge has developed over time and points to strengths and weaknesses in the literature.

There has been much debate about what constitutes quality service and more specifically how this applies to the hotel industry. The industry is a dynamic one in which the guest dictates the pace and type of service, and in which increasing competitiveness has resulted in satisfactory service being the minimum expectation of guests. Different measurements of service expectations have been proposed for the hotel industry but the most promising is the quality function deployment (QFD) approach, which treats service as a process in which the guest ' s expectations are measured at every stage in order to create service that meets and potentially exceeds their expectations.

The highlighted differences between hospitality, hotel and other service organisations indicate where managers and researchers need to place their emphasis in order to enhance the level of service quality.

The paper adds new urgency to the need to develop effective measures and understanding of the hospitality and in particular the hotel experience.