By Nan Crouter
Director, Social Science Research Institute, Penn State University

With John W. O'Neill and Amy Snead

Hotels are a fascinating window into work-life issues. Hotels operate on a 24/7, 365-days-per-year basis. The serenity of hotel lobbies is belied by the often frantic hustle and bustle in the “back of the house” as employees serve meals, clean rooms, organize banquets and weddings, and respond to guests’ needs. “Exciting” and “stressful” are two adjectives that hotel employees frequently use to describe their work. The Penn State Hotel Work & Well Being Initiative pulls together researchers from the fields of hospitality management, human development and family studies, industrial organization psychology, and biobehavioral health to examine work-life issues in the hotel industry. The project is gathering information about work-life issues with the ultimate goal of formulating recommendations to the industry about workplace policies and practices that would facilitate high levels of performance on and off the job.

The project focuses on multiple levels of the industry and capitalizes on different kinds of research methods. At the corporate level, we have conducted qualitative interviews with over 25 highly placed hotel industry executives about where work-life issues fit in terms of strategic competition in the industry and how leaders at this level articulate and prioritize these issues. At the hotel level, we have focused on 50 full-service hotels across the country (New York City metro area, Washington D.C., Kansas City, Chicago, San Francisco, Orlando, Atlanta and Los Angeles). In each hotel, we conducted a face to face interview with the general manager. With their help, we also identified department managers and have just completed telephone interviews with over 500 department managers and over 170 spouses of department managers.

The next tier of this project, underway now, involves “daily diary” interviews with a subset of department managers and their spouses/partners. Participants take part in 15 minute phone interviews for 8 consecutive days, during which they report on the highs and lows of their experiences that day. Participants also provide samples of saliva four times a day on four of the daily diary days. We will assay them for cortisol, a stress hormone that can tell us about physiological reactions to stress. We hope that the daily diary data provide new insights into what hotel work life is like on a daily basis and how daily stressors are related to mood, physical health, perceived productivity, and physiological functioning not only for the hotel employee but for the partner.

Our conversations with hotel executives have made it clear that, like many industries, this industry is grappling with rapidly rising health care costs. Leaders are eager to think about ways to prevent health problems. Executives are also concerned about turnover and how they can retain the best and the brightest in the next generation, a group that puts a premium on work-family balance. The literature on hotel management contains very little empirical work related to work-life issues, making us pioneers! We have created an Advisory Council of hotel industry professionals to provide practical and strategic advice to the project and to tie the project to the industry. We are now moving into the data analysis stage with an eye to how we can make an impact not only in the scholarly community but in the industry.