Factors Motivating Employees in the Hotel Industry in Myanmar

Abstract

Myanmar's hospitality industry faced with challenges of skilled labour shortage. The dilemma arises how to retain valuable staff and motivate them to perform successfully.

(i)The research aims to understand the nature of the employees in hotel industry in Myanmar and helps them to increase their job satisfaction and motivate them for better services. (ii) The data were collected from 103 respondents who were working at three to five stars hotels in Yangon, Bagan and Popa. (iii) Respondents were offered a choice of five-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 “very important”, to 5 “unimportant”. Those 20 questions were basically from motivation factors and hygiene factors of Herzberg’s Two-factor Theory with the objective to rank the attributes and measure the consistency of the theory. (iv) Respondents from all eight departments were grouped into two; frontline employees and supporting employees based on their duties. The study from descriptive statistics suggests that the most important factor for frontline employees is “Management style” while “Good relationship with co- workers” is for supporting employees. (v) Managers need to understand that the motivation factors are highly different depending on the roles of employees. Managers can use the predictors like access to information, extra responsibilities, cash bonus and clear instructions to explain the overall job satisfaction of employees.