Abstract
Human resource (HR) practices have been recognised as a key function in enhancing organisational productivity and competitive advantage. It has been noted that most studies that are based on the relationship between HR practices and performance indicators (e.g., service quality) in hotels hide an important element that tells hoteliers which factors to concentrate on in cases of poor performance. Our study aimed to examine the influence of HR practices on service quality in the Canadian hotel industry. This study seeks to investigate how HR practices (recruitment and selection, training, rewards and incentives, and internal career opportunities) help to improve the service quality. We used a qualitative method by establishing three sets of semi-structured interviews to obtain data from the top to the bottom of the hierarchy within hotels. We found that HR practices help in delivering high service quality. A key contribution of this study that it offers a workable definition of service quality and then a robust model for the relationship between HR practices and service quality that contributes to enhance knowledge of the causal relationship between them. In addition, our study contributes by identifying which HR practices a hotel could adopt to gain a service quality advantage in the marketplace. The data gathered for the proposed study may limit the findings' applicability to independent hotels that are not affiliated with international hotel chains. However, because of the low number of empirical research and the need to get a deeper knowledge of the link between HR practices and service quality, generalisation of the findings from the current descriptive-qualitative study is not a concern. Further research may include some control and context variables (e.g., hotel ownership type, position level, gender) that we did not include in this investigation. In addition, in the future, we recommend using mixed method (quantitative and qualitative) in order to come up with more generalisable results.
Highlights
The hotel industry is experiencing tremendous transformation in terms of the quality of its services and its response rate to the customer’s needs (Mokhtar and Sjahruddin, 2019)
human resources (HR) managers in the hotel industry are placing a lot of emphasis on their HR practices to ensure service quality, and the decision to apply such a focus follows the core realisation that employees are vital to achieving a high level of service quality (Rahman et al, 2019)
We selected the practice of reward and incentives as one of the HR practices that needs to be investigated in this study and how it could affect the level of service quality
Summary
The hotel industry is experiencing tremendous transformation in terms of the quality of its services and its response rate to the customer’s needs (Mokhtar and Sjahruddin, 2019). According to Lin et al, (2021), compensation refers to financial rewards, tangible services and benefits workers receive as an outcome of their employment relationship For this reason, we selected the practice of reward and incentives as one of the HR practices that needs to be investigated in this study and how it could affect the level of service quality. While one may argue that employees are directly responsible for the provision of quality service in a hotel, it is true that the performance depends on motivation, satisfaction and training provided by the HR that drives them to worker harder. For this reason, the present study suggests that HR practices are a significant determinant of service quality. In order to achieve this aim, three objectives have been highlighted: Objective 1 Identify the HR practices that improve or impede service quality from the hotel staff’s perspective
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