- Title
- Employee turnover in the Hong Kong travel agency: perceptual differences between managers and customer contact staff
- Creator
- Choy, Monica Wai Chun
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- Professional Doctorate - Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)
- Description
- Employee retention remains a top priority to facilitate operational effectiveness and improve service quality and profitability in labor-intensive industries like travel agencies. To minimize employee turnover rate and increase employee retention, it is useful to prioritize employee’s expectations by identifying what factors affect their intention and decision to leave or stay. Identifying the existence of any perceptual gaps between employees and managers in terms of these factors can also help focus improvement efforts by directing organizational resources to narrow these gaps. The majority of empirical studies in the industry focus on the catering and lodging sector. Only a limited number of studies focus on voluntary turnover in travel agencies and most of them have adopted a quantitative approach to test existing theories. This study explores and explains the employee turnover phenomena using inductive and qualitative approach by semi-structured interviews to recount and reflect the perceptual difference between customer contact staff and managers over job change. The findings reveal salary and workplace communication and interpersonal relationship are the most important job satisfier/dissatisfier, having a positive/negative impact on intention to leave. Job nature, office location, workplace relationship, remuneration and career prospect are found as the top criteria in deciding job withdrawal. Managers should aim to narrow the perceptual difference between themselves and employee on areas like late penalty, re-hiring opportunities and training. Identification of the gaps between managers and employees can help travel agencies formulate better human resources polices to enhance employee retention. This research also answers the call for empirical studies in travel trading industry to have a better understanding of employee turnover and retention and contribute to theory-building in this important sector. A conceptual framework is developed to delineate the entire voluntary turnover process starting from identifying key job satisfiers and dissatisfiers affecting withdrawal intention, leading to stabilizing and destabilizing factors that subsequently affect the decision to leave/stay. The path is then extended to sources of job withdrawal signal and possible career plans after quitting. The study generates important implications for further research and policy.
- Subject
- employee turnover; travel trade industry; Hong Kong
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1322572
- Identifier
- uon:24604
- Rights
- Copyright 2016 Monica Wai Chun Choy
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 2 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 288 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |