lOMoARcPSD|39150642 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HOCHIMINH CITY INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF BUSINESS PERCEPTION OF WORK ENVIRONMENT AFFECTS EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE IN HOTEL SETTINGS - THE CASE OF MILLENNIALS IN HO CHI MINH CITY In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of BACHELOR OF ARTS in BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION Student’s name: TRAN THI KIM NGAN (BABAIU16092) Advisor: Ms. NGUYEN DUY YEN LINH Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 2020 Downloaded by ANH BACH (bachvan15@gmail.com) lOMoARcPSD|39150642 PERCEPTION OF WORK ENVIRONMENT AFFECTS EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE IN HOTEL SETTINGS THE CASE OF MILLENNIALS IN HO CHI MINH CITY APPROVED BY: Advisor APPROVED BY: Committee members ________________________ _____________________________ Ms. Nguyen Duy Yen Linh Dr. Vo Tuong Huan _____________________________ Dr.
Trinh Viet Dung ______________________________ Ms. Nguyen Duy Yen Linh Downloaded by ANH BACH (bachvan15@gmail.com) lOMoARcPSD|39150642 ACKNOWLEDGMENT This thesis course has been a long journey for me. This would be a decent chance for me to express my thanks to all people that have offered support to me during the thesis time. Firstly, I want to express my most sincere appreciation to my advisor, Ms.
Nguyen Duy Yen Linh, a lecturer at International University – Vietnam National University, who delivers me continuous help and valuable advice during conducting my thesis. Choosing her as my advisor is the most preferred choice that I have ever made. Secondly, I would like to show my greatest admiration and gratitude to all lecturers in the Department of Hospitality Management, especially Mr. Mai Ngoc Khuong and Mr.
Ho Trung Hieu, who are willing to provide valuable suggestions to all the students. Their feedback and advice are of great significance to me. Lastly, I want to say the warmest thanks to all of my friends and colleagues helping me to fill up my surveys and giving me mental motivation. Thereby, I feel be more confident and encouraged to put a concerted attempt to complete my thesis.
Downloaded by ANH BACH (bachvan15@gmail.com) lOMoARcPSD|39150642 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES. vii LIST OF FIGURES. Rationale of Research. Significance of Research.
Scope and Limitations. 8 CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW. Millennials in Work Environment. Variables of the Work environment.
Factor 1: Communication in the Work. Factor 2: Participation in the Work. Factor 3: Organization and Design of The Work. Factor 4: Characteristics of the Work Setting.
Factor 5: Personal Fit of Employees, the Work, and Work Setting. 20 iv Downloaded by ANH BACH (bachvan15@gmail. Factor 6: Personal Fit of Work Group, Work, and Work Setting. Perception of Work Environment, Behavior and Performance.
27 CHAPTER III: METHODOLOGY. Sampling Method and Sample Size. 40 CHAPTER IV: DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS. Characteristics of Sample and Univariate Descriptive and Statistics.
Demographic characteristics of the sample. Univariate descriptive statistics. Reliability Test of Independent Variables. Exploratory Factor Analysis.
Factor analysis of Independent variables. Factor analysis of Dependent variable. Multiple Regression and Path Analysis. Independent Variables directly affect Employee Behavior.
Independent Variables directly affect Employee Performance. Path Diagram of Employee Performance. Indirect Effects on Employee Performance. Total Causal Effects on Employee Performance.
68 CHAPTER V: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION. Discussion of findings. 70 v Downloaded by ANH BACH (bachvan15@gmail. Relationship between Independent variables and Employee Behavior.
Relationship between Employee Behavior and Employee Performance. Direct and Indirect Relationship between Independent variables and Employee Performance. Summary of hypothesis testing. Recommendations and Implications.
Recommendation for further research. Implications in the Hospitality industry. 78 LIST OF REFERENCES. 92 vi Downloaded by ANH BACH (bachvan15@gmail.com) lOMoARcPSD|39150642 LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Number of Tourist Accommodation Establishments 4-5 stars .1: Independent and Dependent Variables in the research .2: Demographic Questionnaire Measurement.3: Strength of Path Coefficients .2: Descriptive Statistics of Independent variables .3: Descriptive Statistics of Dependent Variables.4: Rules of Thumb for Evaluating Cronbach’s Alpha.5: Corrected Item-Total Correlation and Cronbach’s Alpha” .6: KMO and Bartlett's Test of independent variables .7: Total Variance Explained of Independent Variables .8: Table of Rotated Component Matrix of Independent Variables .9: Final Test of Rotated Component Matrix of Independent Variables .10: Final Test of KMO and Bartlett's Test of Independent Variables .11: Total Variance Explained of Independent Variables .12: KMO and Bartlett's Test of Dependent Variables .13: Total Variance Explained of Dependent Variables .14: Factor Loadings and Reliability of Dependent Variables.
58 vii Downloaded by ANH BACH (bachvan15@gmail.com) lOMoARcPSD|39150642 Table 4.15: Pearson Correlations between Independent Variables and EB .16: Effect Coefficients between Independent Variables and EB .19: Pearson Correlations between Independent Variables and EP.20: Effect Coefficients between Independent Variables and EP .23: Direct, Indirect and Total Causal Effects on Employee Performance. 69 Table 5: Summary of hypothesis testing. 73 viii Downloaded by ANH BACH (bachvan15@gmail.com) lOMoARcPSD|39150642 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Conceptual Research Model. 27 Figure 2: Research Design.
33 Figure 3: The Percentage of Attendant’s Gender. 43 Figure 4: The Education Level of Eespondents. 44 Figure 5: Revised Research Model. 66 ix Downloaded by ANH BACH (bachvan15@gmail.com) lOMoARcPSD|39150642 ABSTRACT In recent years, luxury hotels and the lodging sector as a whole have witnessed the noticeable change in service provision strategy, especially their human resources.
To get a deep grasp of their employees, there were tons of researches conducted to explore and analyse the environmental factors affecting their performance in order to design development intervention. This quantitative research focuses on how millennials perceive their work environment in four-and-five-star hotels and its relationship with their behaviors and then their performance. Questionnaire survey was delivered to 288 respondents who stays in Ho Chi Minh City and have had working experience in hotels setting. The results illustrated that while Communication in the work (CO) had the highest direct effect on Employee Performance (EP) through Employee Behavior (EB), the factor of Characteristics of Working Setting (WS) witnessed a significantly indirect effect on Employee Performance (EP).
x Downloaded by ANH BACH (bachvan15@gmail.com) lOMoARcPSD|39150642 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION 1. Research Background The tourism and hospitality industry is expected to become a key contributor to the economy and overall growth of the world as well as the Vietnam market. According to Vietnamnews, tourism revenue of Vietnam estimated at VND 620 trillion (nearly US$27 billion) in 2018, witnessing an increase of approximately VND 110 trillion in comparision to the previous year. Statistics collected by The Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) depicts that the year 2018 witnessed a gradual upsurge in the arrivals as well as receipts of international travellers.
To be more specific, the figures for tourism receipts increased a high of VND 637 trillion and total international tourists to the country gained over 18 million arrivals in 2019, which contributed around 5% of the GDP as VNAT and Statista state. Currently, Vietnam prevails among tourist destinations, especially in Southeast Asia. Therefore, forms of accommodation, in particular four-star and five-star hotels have been remaining in a sheer demand. Integrating into global trends, many travelling cities in Vietnam comprising Da Nang, Da Lat, Nha Trang are quickly turning into a newly-trended place, yet Ho Chi Minh city (HCMC) is regarded as the most outstanding destinations luring tourists' preference for coming.
In current time, the exclusive segment of hotel has experienced an remarkable upward change with regard to revenue. The data collected from Statista 1 Downloaded by ANH BACH (bachvan15@gmail.com) lOMoARcPSD|39150642 describes that there is a marked increase in revenue amounts from US$1,373 million in 2018 to US$1,414 million in 2019, and this still has an upward tendency in the following years. Additionally, there is a steady growth in the accommodation supply of hotels every year. Especially, in terms of the upscale hotels, it is reported that the number of tourist accommodation establishments of four to five-star hotels has witnessed a stable increase over the years respectively.
It is demonstrated that the market of luxury hotels are still drawing enormous attention from international and local developers and investors. Table 1: Number of Tourist Accommodation Establishments 4-5 stars (Source: VNAT, 2020) Concerning the strategy for tourism development in the following years, a statistics is assuming that total revenue from tourists in 2050 will rise by approximately 4 times compared to the projected figures before for 2030 (Dmitrovic, Cvelbar, Kolar, Brencic, Ograjenšek, & Žabkar, 2009; Ranjbarian, & Pool, 2015). Also, Vietnam has become a global fascinating traveling destination and will consider tourism as a key economic market with high competitiveness. In order to obtain these targets, besides attracting international tourists, human resources management, needless to say, should be prioritized.
Of employee-related studies, the perception of the work environment has 2 Downloaded by ANH BACH (bachvan15@gmail.com) lOMoARcPSD|39150642 been appreciated by many scholars since its importance in attracting and retaining talents as well as employee performance in organizations. As the statistics of The Worldometers, the age groups of 25-54 and 15-24 account for 45.7% namely in the Population pyramid of Vietnam in 2020. In other words, millennials in this case range from 1981 to 1999 (Lancaster & Stillman, 2002), taking up the majority of the workforce in Vietnam nowadays. That is why this employee group will be a targeted sample of this quantitative research to describe the correlations between their work-environment perception, behaviors, and performance.
The 21st-century workplace is changing at a burgeoning rate. One of the significant shift is that today's younger workforce belonging to the millennial group (Generation Y) represent significantly different attributes, and especially more frequent in job-hopping phenomenon than the other generations. Therefore, this leads to certain challenges in potential millennials’ retention in the competitive workforce for organizations. In this sense, the theory of human performance technology (HPT) realizes there is the influence of both individual and organizational factors and final job performance (Tiem, Moseley & Dessinger, 2004).
Specifically, these factors are relating to the environmental support which has the potential power to sustain and bolster desireable performance and especially, it is necessary to consider perceptions of workers in the analysis of performance, selection and design of performance development (Bell, 2008). Rationale of Research Initially, the immensity of the study concerning what employees perceive affecting their behaviors as well as performance in the work setting has been widespread over the nations. Bell (2008) invited 312 participants from companies in Chicago to gain a profound understanding of perception in terms of the American working environment 3 Downloaded by ANH BACH (bachvan15@gmail.com) lOMoARcPSD|39150642 among four prominent generations. There is the article done by Richardson, Scott, Thomas, Nicholas in 2012, which investigates the students' perceptions of the job pursuit in the hospitality industry in this nation.
In another exploratory study implemented, the authors examined similar and different traits in work environment-related perceptions with the effect of nationally cultural factors (Ripley, Hudson, Turner, & Osman Gani, 2006). The population investigated is relatively huge, comprising developed Asia (South Korea and Singapore), American, and Europe (Australia, New Zealand). Although relationships have been demonstrated with various samples, the same investigation still not available in Vietnam. Besides, it is unarguable that the hospitality is one of the most potentially fast-growing sectors in Vietnam.
Therefore, this study will be implemented to apply this topic into the context of Vietnam, especially HCMC - the most developed city of this country. In addition, according to there are substantial differences of perception of work environment among generations, ranging from Baby boomers, GenX, and GenY (Earle, 2003 & Bell, 2008). From the effect of perception, behaviors, as well as the performance of the millennial group, also differ those of other groups in the workplace. Hence, the author wants to explore and comprehend more detailed insight of millennials in particular in the modern days.
It is because the preponderance of employees in Vietnam’s workforce belongs to millennials so organizations must acknowledge the attributes of this group, and design an effective work environment. On top of that, with the personal experience of the author, it is not easy to keep employees committed to a hospitality organization.