| Author: | Siu, Tsz Ying Grace |
| Title: | The inter-relationship of core job characteristics and work-life balance towards job satisfaction and future career intention of hotel interns |
| Degree: | M.Phil. |
| Year: | 2012 |
| Subject: | Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | School of Hotel and Tourism Management |
| Pages: | ix, 234 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm. |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Many hotel management students show negative attitudes towards entering the hotel industry. Such attitudes are likely the result of a negative internship experience that may cause a young person to quickly turn away from the industry. At present, work-life imbalance is identified as one of the possible reasons for turnover as well as health and mental problems of employees. Work-life balance (WLB) is recognized as one of the top five important challenges in human resource management which needs to be further addressed and researched. Thus, it is imperative to investigate the WLB of hotel management students during their internship. Additionally, different hotel job characteristics would lead to different internship experiences. The Job Characteristics Model (JCM) developed by Hackman and Oldham (1976) was employed by many researchers to study employees' job satisfaction in different job positions such as engineers, teachers and sales representatives (Behson, Eddy, & Lorenzet., 2000). Thus, this study adopts hotel internship as a study background to apply JCM in examining hotel management students' internship experience. The present study aims at establishing a conceptual framework by reviewing extensive literature to further investigate the inter-relationship of both internship core job characteristics (CJC) and WLB towards hotel interns' general job satisfaction (GJS) and future career intention (FCI). It is worthwhile to build up this conceptual framework since both aspects of working experience and emotional experience are represented. CJC are related to job nature and WLB is related to the trade-off between personal issue and work; whereas GJS is related to the emotional issue of the interns at work. When these issues are investigated together in a conceptual framework, the students' career interests, competency, and expectation of the industry in the future can be revealed. The main survey was conducted from November 8, 2011 to December 7, 2011 by targeting hotel management undergraduates who had at least one month of hotel internship experience as research sample. A total of 470 valid data were collected by using purposive sampling method. After conducting the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), a group of scales designed to specifically measure the perceived CJC and WLB in hotel internship had been verified. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was then employed to test the conceptual framework. The findings indicated that the measurement model and structural model both fit the data fairly well; and all the eight hypotheses among the four constructs (CJC, WLB, GJS and FCI) were supported. The present results demonstrated that when hotel management students perceived better CJC and WLB in their internship, they were more satisfied and were more likely to select the hotel industry as their future career. Additionally, when the students experienced greater job satisfaction, they scored higher on the intention to choose a hotel job in the future. Interestingly, a higher score on perceived CJC was a good predictor of a higher degree of WLB during internship. Finally, theoretical implications of the research findings and practical recommendations were offered for hotel management's consideration. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| b25512870.pdf | For All Users | 4.04 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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