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For enhanced service quality, pay attention to the front desk first.
Understanding how guests evaluate service quality is important in designing an effective hotel strategy.1 Because guests base their evaluations on their perceptions of the service encounter, it is important that hotels manage those perceptions as effectively as possible.2 Arguably, the most important factor present within the hotel service encounter is the performance of customer-contact employees. Gronroos, in fact, argues that employee performance constitutes the service, as far as most customers are concerned.3 Thus, employee performance is an important cue used by guests to infer the overall quality of a hotel.
Hotel competitiveness ultimately depends on the management of human resources.4 Hotels spend roughly 1 to 5 percent of employees' paid time on training activities designed to enhance workers performance.5 Given the strategic importance of employee performance, hotels are now focusing their efforts on enhancing the intangible aspects of service delivery, such as the interaction between employees and guests.6 However, at least one study has found that much of this effort is directed at improving performance elements that are important to hotel managers, such as productivity and efficiency, rather than performance elements that are important to hotel guests.7 Furthermore, managers may focus on improving the performance of certain employees while paying little or no attention to other, perhaps more important, types of employees. For example, managers may focus on improving the performance of sales employees with little or no regard for improving the performance of its housekeepers. In the end, improving hotel service quality depends on improving employee performance in ways that matter most to guests, not managers.8
From a strategic perspective, hotel managers must carefully manage the different types of employee performance so that each serves as an appropriate cue to service quality. Determining the most relevant types of employee performance is crucial in this endeavor, as it allows managers to allocate human resources more efficiently to improve overall service quality.
The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the importance of different performance levels of various employee groups in an empirical manner that provides useful implications for hotel managers and researchers. Our approach is grounded in the work of Cadotte and Turgeon and that of Silverman and Grover in that it...