Understanding hotel employee career behaviour: Developing and testing an integrative model in the context of Ghanaian hotel industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Ghanaian hotel industry faces persistent challenges in attracting, retaining, and reducing turnover among frontline employees. This thesis investigates these challenges by developing and testing an integrated career intention model that explains the career behaviours of hotel employees. Guided by social cognitive career theory (SCCT), social identity theory (SIT), and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), the study aims to examine how individual-level factors (career beliefs and career identity), an organisational-level factor (transformational leadership), and a sociocultural factor (subjective norms) influence frontline hotel employees’ career attitudes and intentions. A sequential mixed method approach was employed. Qualitatively, semi-structured interviews were conducted to identify and explain hotel career beliefs in the hotel employment context. Quantitatively, partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyse the structural relationships among hotel career beliefs, career identity, transformational leadership, career attitude, subjective norms and career intentions. Qualitative data was collected from 24 hotel frontline employees, while quantitative data was collected from a sample of 769 hotel frontline employees across five cities in Ghana. Findings revealed that customer service skills, professionalism, and a strong commitment to customer satisfaction were significant hotel career beliefs. Three core dimensions of hotel career beliefs emerged: customer service, workplace experiences, and work expectations. The quantitative results indicated that hotel career beliefs positively predicted career identity, which in turn significantly predicted career intentions. Career intentions negatively affect turnover intentions. The quantitative research results further revealed that subjective norms significantly and positively influence career attitudes. Transformational leadership not only strengthens employees’ career attitudes and intentions but also moderates the relationship between subjective norms and career attitudes, amplifying their positive effect. Favourable career attitudes strongly predict employees’ career intentions, underscoring the importance of cultivating positive perceptions to enhance employee commitment. This research addressed significant gaps in hospitality career studies and offers practical implications for improving employee attraction, retention and career development in the hotel industry. The findings offer practical implications for the hospitality and tourism (H&T) industry, particularly across collectivist (Africa and Asia) and individualist (U.S., Australia, Canada, and Europe) contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".