PERCEPTIONS AND ATTITUDES OF AIRLINE EMPLOYEES TOWARDS DIVERSITY. A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

As the world tourism market is continuously changing, travel by air is considered the most widespread mode of mass international tourism. Considering new ways of management that airlines need to adopt in order to have a well trained and qualified management team, this survey explored the attributes of airline employees and their interactions with diverse customers, and identified the sufficient role of employees’ training and the advantages of diversity management. Simple random sampling method was applied to gather 309 airline employees’ questionnaires on their attitudes towards diversity. Descriptive and inductive analyses were used in order to present the obtained data. Principal Component Analysis was conducted to predefine three factors. Pearson correlation coefficient was applied to present the direction of the relationship between extracted factors and employee’s occupational status. Authors’ findings emphasise that airline employees seek a workplace with a friendly atmosphere that respects the diversity of employees and customers and they in their turn support airlines to operate over the comfort zone in order to achieve organisation’s goals and customers’ satisfaction. As the world keeps advancing, planning a diversity strategy should be the first step any modern-day organisation should explore prior to embarking anything related to a diverse workplace.