Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Volume 23, Issue 6

This issue includes eight research articles. The first article, by Godwin-Charles A. Ogbeide and Robert J. Harrington, looks at how the degree of participation at various hierarchical levels impacts action plan implementation success and firm financial performance. The authors collected data through a survey from a sample of members in a US state restaurant association. The research findings indicate that, regardless of firm size or industry segment, the direct effects of greater top management involvement and the interaction effects of one three-way interaction (middle management, lower management, and frontline staff) and the four-way interaction led to higher levels of action plan success. The study findings imply that senior management participatory approaches are important to enhance financial and strategy implementation success regardless of firm size.

The second article, by Jungsun Kim, Mehmet Erdem, Jungwoo Byun and Hwayoung Jeong, investigates perceived importance of soft skills for hotel employees and their willingness to use electronic learning (e-learning) as a training tool to improve their soft skills. The sample was randomly selected from hotel employees working at various upscale international chain hotels in South Korea. The results of the study reveal that responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, and working with diverse groups are rated as being more important by younger hotel employees. The results also suggest that learners who have higher extrinsic motivations in using e-learning will be more likely to use e-learning.

The third article, by Annmarie Nicely, Radesh Palakurthi and Denise Gooden, aims to identify behaviours linked to hotel managers who report a high degree of work-related learning. The authors collected data from 154 hotel managers in the island of Jamaica. Of the four behaviours examined, two predicted the hotel managers’ individual work-related learning levels:

1. 1.

   their perceived risk-taking abilities; and

2. 2.

   their attitudes towards learning.

Managers who reported high work-related learning levels also reported high risk-taking abilities and more positive attitudes towards learning.

In the following article, Elbeyi Pelit, Yüksel Öztürk and Yalçn Arslantürk examine the impact of employee empowerment on job satisfaction. The study covers 1,854 participants employed at five-star hotels in Turkey. The findings suggest that the most positive aspects related to job satisfaction are relations with the colleagues and physical conditions, while the most negative aspect is the wage issue, i.e. unfair payment.

In her paper, Hania Janta explores the experiences of Polish migrant workers in the UK’s hospitality sector across the UK. The author collected data through qualitative and quantitative methods comprising an online survey, interviews and netnography. The profile of workers emerging from the study indicated that those who work or worked in UK hospitality were predominantly young, female and highly qualified. Migrants work in various hospitality departments and an important pattern shows that they gradually move to jobs in supervisory and front-of-house positions.

In the next paper, Amrik Singh aims to propose new lease accounting rules that may fundamentally change the way leases are accounted for and reported in financial statements. The author employs a case study approach, and the results of the study show that the financial statement presented will change dramatically when lease assets and liabilities are added to the balance sheet. The expense recognition pattern will change significantly and will negatively impact performance measures such as interest coverage and capital ratios, but will improve cash flow measures such as EBIT and EBITDA.

In their paper, Rodolfo Baggio and Ruggero Sainaghi provide a series of quantitative methods to assess the dynamics of non-linear complex tourism systems. The time series used in the paper contained data collected from a sample of 23 large (four star) hotels located in Milan, Italy. Their results confirm the complex nature of the destination system and its tendency towards a chaotic state. The paper suggests that the system under study exhibits an unequivocal complex nature. It tends towards a chaotic stage but does so at a slow pace.

The final paper, by Seoki Lee and Qu Xiao, examines the potential curvilinear relationship between capital intensity and firm value for the US hospitality industry, specifically including publicly traded US hotels and restaurants, during the period 1990 to 2008. The authors performed a pooled regression analysis to examine the proposed relationship. The sampled companies are from the period 1990-2008, consisting of 281 and 1,406 observations for the hotel and restaurant industries, respectively. The findings support the U-shaped relationship between capital intensity and firm performance during the 2000s for both hotels and restaurants, while no relationship exists during the 1990s. The results of the study imply that the relationship between capital intensity and a firm’s value may not be linear, but possibly curvilinear.

We hope that our readers find all the articles published in this issue timely, relevant and useful.

Fevzi OkumusEditor-in Chief