Performance Management Assignment: Employee Retention In Hotel Sector Of Maldives

Question

Task:
This is an individual performance management assignment. The objective of the task is to develop the skills and ability to write up a research proposal that is consistent with the research question(s) or the research hypotheses. Students are expected to complete a research proposal and identify critical points and issues occurring within the project period, through the utilization of strategies such as a project timeframe, resource lists etc.

Answer

Abstract
The topic selected for the research proposal on performance management assignment aims to investigate on the employee performance and retention in the hotel sector of Maldives. The proposed research aims to conduct a quantitive study, in which survey will be used to collect the data. The sample population for the proposed research are employees working in hotel organizations of Maldives and the data will be collected from the sample population via online platform. The findings of the proposed study will contribute crucial results for the existing literature.

Introduction
In the current era, the employees are not only regarded as the mere staff or members of the organizations, but they are considered to be one of the most valuable assets of the organization. In concern to the hotel sector, employees serve myriad purpose because their function includes both physical and abstract role. In the hotel sector, the employees are tasked to take care of the guests while providing them satisfying experiences, and therefore the performance of the individual employee plays a significant role towards the success of the organization. However, with the rapid increase of globalization, digitalization, and changing behaviors of the customers, the employees of the hotel sector are likely to face severe workload which causes high turnover of the employees. The HR management of the hotel sector has been consistently focusing on enhancing both the employee performance and employee retention strategy in order to avoid high rates of turnover, while efficiently enhancing the employee performance, in order to meet the organizational goal.

In concern to these factors, this research proposal aims towards analyzing the employee performance and retention in the hotel sector, primarily in relation to the hotel sectors of Maldives. With its unique geography, Maldives has become of the best yielding market in Asia, with reputed tourist luxury and resorts and most of the most visited tourist destination. With the unique concept of “one island, one resort’, Maldives has established itself as a top bucket list destination for tourists. Therefore, in order to maintain its position in the competitive business environment, it is crucial for the hotel sector in Maldives to primarily emphasize on employee performance and employee retention, because the significance of employee in the hotel sector cannot be neglected.

Context
Tourism in Maldives began since 1970’s, after the discovery of its tourist potential with the clear water, white-sand beaches, year-round sunshine, and abundance of marine life. In the current century, tourism has significantly increases in Maldives, wherein tourism is now one of the biggest sectors of economy in Maldives (Zubair & Bouchon, 2014).The opportunity for the various local and international business ventures has created more community involvement, which has given a significant growth to the hotel sector in Maldives. According to census 2014, there were around 27,828 employees working in the tourist resort, wherein around 25,644 were male and around 2,184 female workers (Laila et al., 2019). Therefore, it can be clearly noticed that hotel sector has been efficiently growing in Maldives, while proving a massive number of employability. The country has a continuous growth in arrivals within the last nineteen centuries, wherein the arrival has been estimated to almost triple over the last years. However, the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic has adversely affected the entire hotel sector in the Maldives as well as on the entire globe, from which the hotel sectors in Maldives have been consistently trying to overcome the negative impacts of the pandemic.

Problem Statement
One of the major issues in the hospitality industry is the retention of the employees, wherein little emphasis is given towards the development of the retention strategy (Ghani et al., 2022). The HRM practices is highly debated topic which is covered by various scholars across the globe however, the retention of employee in relation to HRM practices has very little sources (Imna & Hassan, 2015). With the significant and rapid growth of hotel sector in Maldives, the employee are likely to face the pressure of high performance, along with sever workload, and long working hours, which aid towards high-rate of employee turnover. The turnover of employees is undoubtedly one of the major issues faced by the hotel sector and therefore, it is crucial to focus on both the employee performance as well as the retention of the employee, which this proposal aims to address.

Purpose and rationale of the research
Employee performance is a crucial factor for organizational excellence and the retention of employees in an organization indicates satisfaction of the employees with the workplace as well as the working conditions. The topic is selected for the proposed research as there is a limited existing study that reflects on the employee retention and performance in hotel sector of Maldives and the study intend to investigate on the employees’ retention in hotel sector in current situation as covid affected significantly to hotel sector. The study is important for diverse range of people such as hotel organizations, employees working for hotel organizations, the scholar who will conduct future research in the similar research area. The key benefits that will occur through the proposed research are- the employee performance of hotel sector of Maldives will be reflected, the covid impact on hotel sector and performance of employees will be highlighted, and retention status in the hotel sector of Maldives will be reflected.

Key stakeholders and audience
The project report can be used for different purpose such as developing strategies for the hotel organizations to strengthen the policies to retain employees. The project report will also be helpful for future researchers who want to conduct study in similar research topic. Apart from that, the organizations that are seeking advice for employees retention; the study will be helpful to resolve the retention related issues at certain context.

Possible research questions
The key research questions that need to be addressed in the proposed research are:

1. 74What are the factors influencing the employee performance in the hotel sector of Maldives?
2. What is the current status of employee retention in this sector?
3. What is the covid impact on the employee performance and retention of employees in this sector?

Literature Review
According to Imna and Hassan, (2015) human resource management is one of the key management undertakings which is involved in decision making and impacts the nature of rapport between the organization and the employees. Human resource management can be described as the term which defines the practices, philosophy, procedures and policies interrelated in managing people in a corporation. Sittisom and Sriviboon (2020) state the market of hospitality has become increasingly competitive and it is the responsibility of the organizational planners to enhance the components which contribute to the happiness of the customers. The employees working as service providers are the pivotal point between the organization's customer orientation and the customers, the performance of the employees is vital to attain success. The performance of the employees plays a crucial role during service encounters since it proceeds to create the perceptions of the customers. During the service encounter customers evaluate various aspects thus, it is imperative for the employees to focus on providing the needed civility and concern by listening to the customers with full attention and understanding. Researchers have calculated the relationship between the performance of the employees and customer satisfaction and found that the performance of the employees impacts the overall satisfaction of the customers.

As stated by Ghani et al. (2022) human resource management can be described as the process of selection and recruitment, appraisal and performance administration, training and development, the wellbeing of the workers and relationship with employees in order to achieve the goals of the organization. The term employee retention refers to the methodical effort to improve and create an atmosphere that continues to motivate workers to work while integrating practices and policies which suits their diverse needs. The procedure of retaining the workers and encouraging them to stay with the corporation for as long as possible is known as employee retention. The retention of employees has developed as a crucial strategic distress for the business of the hospitality industry thereby contributing to the relevance of the research question. Muna et al., (2021) state that there is a clear connection between selection and training. The HR activities such as the practice of recruitment and selection can significantly minimize the rate of employee turnover. There are various cases in the literature that shows that the effectiveness of recruitment depends on the performance and the best suitable effective recruitment policy can assess through investigating employee's performance, survival rate and turnover rate. Usually, HRM selection and recruitment practices predict the rate of voluntary turnover and critical challenges of the employees. There have also been various pieces of evidence that suggest that the turnover in the hospitality or hotel industry is largely due to dissatisfaction with factors such as working conditions, supervisors, job content, size of hotels, work timings, salary and other benefits.

As per Struwig and Hansens (2021), the concerning degree of employee turnover in the hotel industry poses a great challenge for hospitality business companies and owners and hotel leaders and has produced a feeling of helplessness. The strategy of effective talent retention, therefore, plays a crucial role in the hospitality industry. Employees play the most imperative part within the corporation and can be considered as the most valuable asset, thus it is imperative to retain the employees through offering settled and dynamic working conditions. It is also crucial to undertake a talent retention programme to meet the important component of the human resource management function of an organization. The hospitality industry is a complex and demanding space and employee performance is the most crucial component since they tend to have direct contact with the guests and are also responsible for satisfying the guests. Thus, it is imperative to increase the pride and job satisfaction of the employees in the hospitality industry while also providing proper training which will facilitate them to face any situation.

The reviewed literature indicates that there is lack of previous research that can address the research problem. The study will be conducted on hotel sector of Maldives and the specific focus on hotel sector of Maldives will contribute significant findings to the existing literature.

Groups or sampling
For the completion of this research proposal, a quantitative research method has been used. The quantitative research method primarily deals with the analysis and quantifying variables in order to obtain appropriate results (Apuke, 2017). Through this method, the issues and the phenomenon has been attempted to demonstrate while gathering numerical data and analyzing it with the aid of mathematical methods. Since the hotel sector in the Maldives is extensively huge, it was not possible to include every subject related to the topic. In concern to this, the sampling that has been used in this proposal is convenience sampling. This sampling is a form of non-random sampling, within which the participants of the target populations, which meet certain practical criterion, like geographical proximity, easy accessibility, and availability within the given period, are incorporated for the rationale of the study (Etikan et al., 2016). Therefore, in this proposal, around eighteen employees from various hotel sectors in the Maldives were selected to gather the relevant data.

Data gathering techniques
The method of data collection for the proposed research is quantitative in nature. Quantitative method allows the researcher to collect data that provide numerical results by using questionnaire with multiple-choice question or close ended questions. Quantitative method emphasizes on the objective measurements and numerical analysis is conducted to analyse the data that are collected through quantitative data collection techniques.

The proposed participants for the research are employees working in the hotel organizations in Maldives. The employees are selected as the target population for the proposed study as the study aims to collect data regarding employee performance and retention in the hotel sector and collecting data directly from the population who are experiencing it ensures the validity and reliability of data. The sample selection will be done based on convenient sampling, which means the sample will be drawn from the population that is approachable or close to hand. The data will be collected online and the participants will be selected from LinkedIn as it is one of the effective social networking sites that have profiles of numerous professionals and employees working in different industry. It will allow connecting with the target population. Firstly, the profiles of target population will be analysed with their profile description such as basic information about their job role, and demographic details.

The data collection will be conducted online and the instrument that is suitable to collect data is close-ended survey questionnaire. Survey is suitable instrument for data collection for the proposed research as the research aims to provide quantitative results. The close ended questionnaire is helpful to provide quantitative results as the participants will provide their answers based on the options included with each question. The survey questionnaire will be formed systematic way, firstly the questions related to demographic details will be included, and then the research related questions will be included. Survey questions will be based on research questions as well as the purpose of the study. The analysis of the collected data will be done using Microsoft excel. For the data collection procedure, at first the sample population will be communicated about the purpose of the research and survey, after taking their consent to participate in the survey, survey questionnaire will sent to them via mail. The survey questions will include options, so they have to highlight one option from one question to provide their opinion regarding the question. The survey instrument is the key to data collection in this research, which indicates the data collection for the proposed research is based on primary source.

Suggested analysis procedure
The hypotheses for the proposed study are:

H1: Employee satisfaction indicates positive performance of employees in the hotel sector of Maldives.

H2: Employee satisfaction is positively related with the retention of employees in the hotel sector.

H3: Covid has negative impact on the employee performance and retention in the hotel sector of Maldives.

The results of the proposed research will be presented to justify the hypothesis, whether the results supports the hypotheses or denies them. The key variables that will be included in the analysis are employee performance, employee satisfaction, and employee retention and covid impact. The dependent and independent relationship is the cause and effect relationship among the variables. In the present context, the hypotheses development has the cause effect relationship. Positive performance is the dependent variable on the first hypothesis and employee satisfaction is the independent variable. Similarly, the other hypothesis is also in cause effect relationship, which means they contain dependent and independent variables. The study will provide quantitative results, which will either support the hypotheses or provide different results against the hypothesis. The Microsoft excel will be used for the analyses as it is one of the suitable application to analyse the quantitive data. The results of the proposed study can be presented using the bar graphs and pie charts with the interpretations of the results for better understanding of the findings. The results of the study will be reflected in a systematic way to provide clear description about the results to the target audience.

The data will be mainly collected from primary data using survey and the quantitative results will be presented in the research. There will be no use other data collection instrument, so the type of data and results will be limited in nature. In the case of categories of responses, there will be different type of data that will be collected from the participants such as demographic data, employees job experience related data, their expectancy from the workplace and factors affecting their retention in the workplace. There will be different type of responses that will be collected from the participants and the different type of responses will help to address the research questions.

Expected Results and Output of the Study

Implications and limitations
This research proposal has aimed towards analyzing the employee performance and retention in the hotel sector of Maldives, and therefore the findings of this research proposal are primarily based on the hotel sector of Maldives only. Hence one of the major implications of this research proposal is that the proposal has illustrated that employee performance can be enhanced through motivation and therefore the HRM practices of the hotel sector in the Maldives need to focus on employee motivation. Another implication of this proposal is that the primary reason for employee turnover in the hotel sector is the long working hours and work pressure from the management, and therefore making flexible policies and routine is likely to help in the retention of the employees. The two major limitations of this proposal are that firstly the data that has been collected and analyzed is not obtained from the senior management, as it was drawn from the employees of certain hotel sectors of Maldives only. Another limitation of this proposal is that the generalizability of the convenience sampling can be unclear; therefore the findings derived from this sampling method can be biased because the data that has been collected are from the small target population only which may vary.

Ethical issues
Confidentiality is one of the major ethical issues that can be faced by this research proposal. It is crucial that the identity of the participants must be kept confidential while extending the assurance beyond protecting the name of the participants including circumventing the use of self-identifying proclamation and information (Fleming & Zegwaard, 2018). Another ethical issue that this proposal might face is informed consent, wherein the participants might agree to participate in the survey without properly understanding the purpose of the report and the consequences of providing answers for the survey. In order to resolve these ethical issues, the participants’ identity will be promised to keep confidential, along with the protection from potential harm. In addition to this, it will be ensured that the participants have clearly understood the purpose of the survey.

Draft timeline and budget
The budget is one of the crucial factors in research and for the proposed research, the key area that related cost concern are internet usage, data collection from participants, project completion. The internet usage cost for the project is estimated as $15, for data collection, there is no need to spend as the data will be collected via online platform. The project completion activities such as printing, binding cost and making hard copy of the project requires an estimated cost of $20. The timeline shown in appendix indicates the key activities of the research starting from problem identification, literature review to data collection and other parts of research in the final project.

References
Apuke, O. D. (2017). Quantitative Research Methods : a Synopsis Approach. Kuwait Chapter of Arabian Journal of Business and Management Review, 6(10), 40–47. https://doi.org/10.12816/0040336

Etikan, I., Musa, S. A., &Alkassim, R. S. (2016).Comparison of convenience sampling and purposive sampling.American Journal of Theoretical and Applied Statistics, 5(1), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajtas.20160501.11

Fleming, J., & Zegwaard, K. (2018).Methodologies, methods and ethical considerations for conducting research in work-integrated learning. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1196755.pdf

Ghani, B., Zada, M., Memon, K. R., Ullah, R., Khattak, A., Han, H., Ariza-Montes, A., & Araya-Castillo, L. (2022). Challenges and Strategies for Employee Retention in the Hospitality Industry: A Review. Sustainability, 14(5), 2885. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14052885

Ghani, B., Zada, M., Memon, K. R., Ullah, R., Khattak, A., Han, H., Ariza-Montes, A., & Araya-Castillo, L. (2022). Challenges and Strategies for Employee Retention in the Hospitality Industry: A Review. Sustainability, 14(5), 2885. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14052885

Imna, M., & Hassan, Z. (2015).(PDF) Influence of Human Resource Management practices on Employee Retention in Maldives Retail Industry. Performance management assignment ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316013676_Influence_of_Human_Resource_Management_practices
_on_Employee_Retention_in_Maldives_Retail_Industry

Laila, A., Shahuda, A., Shazna, A., & Ibrahim, M. (2019).National Bureau of Statistics In collaboration with Ministry of Tourism Republic of Maldives. http://statisticsmaldives.gov.mv/nbs/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Resort-Employee-Survey-2019-1.pdf

Muna, F., Ferdous, A. S. M., &Albattat, A. (2021).Advances in global services and retail management: Volume 2. Anahei Publishing. https://doi.org/10.5038/9781955833035 (Original work published 2021)

Sittisom, W., &Sriviboon, C. (2020).The Influence of Human Resource Management Practices on Employee Performance in the Hospitality and Tourism Industry in Indonesia.International Journal of Innovation, Creativity and Change.Www.ijicc.net, 11(6), 2020. https://www.ijicc.net/images/Vol11iss6/11649_Sittisom_2020_E_R.pdf

Struwig, M., &Hansens, M. (2021).The Influence of Sustainable Initiatives on Hotel Guest Experience.African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure, 10(2), 425–440. https://doi.org/10.46222/ajhtl.19770720-109

Zubair, F. N. I., & Bouchon, F. (2014). Maldives as a Backpacker’s Destination: Supply and Demand Perspectives. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 144, 256–263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.07.294

Appendices
Appendix 1: Gantt chart

Appendix 2: Budget for the research project

Appendix 3: Survey questionnaire sample

Name:

Age:

Gender:

Years of experience:

1. What is the key factor of your job that is motivating you to provide better performance?

• Salary
• Flexibility
• Additional benefits
• Support from management

2. Does your organization provide sufficient training to improve your skills and knowledge regarding the work?

• Yes
• No

3. Are you satisfied with your current job role?

• Totally satisfied
• Satisfied
• Partially satisfied
• Partially dissatisfied
• Totally dissatisfied

4. How does your organization assess your regular performances?

• With monthly targets
• Team work
• Individual performance

5. Are you satisfied with the current way of assessing your performance at the organization?

• Totally satisfied
• Satisfied
• Partially satisfied
• Partially dissatisfied
• Totally dissatisfied

6. Are your satisfied with the current benefits provided by your company for future scope of career growth?

• Totally satisfied
• Satisfied
• Partially satisfied
• Partially dissatisfied
• Totally dissatisfied