Emotional Labor within Hotel Industry – A Case Study of Hotels in Ranchi

Abstract

Hotel Industry is a labour intensive, service industry and the core of any service industry is to keep the customer satisfied. However, to achieve this goal, the staffs working in the hotel industry many times must fake their emotions. This is termed as Emotion Labour and many researchers have worked in the field of emotional labour. However, most of these works focused mainly on the core of emotional labour in general and hotel industry specific emotional labour research is very few. Even those which are available, are not in the context of Indian Hotel Industry.  Hence, there remains a gap in the research and more work is to be done in Emotional Labour in Indian Hotel Industry. In this backdrop, current study is an attempt to find the existence and acceptance of emotional labour in employees of hotel industry.  The study was conducted in Hotels of Ranchi to find how the employees interpret themselves as emotional labourer. Questionnaire was floated to the employees who interact with the guest in hotel industry and their responses were recorded in the Likert five-point scale. The result suggest that emotional labour is high in the hotel industry and the hotelier need to change their perception regarding staff involvement. The study also suggests that emotional labor should be considered seriously, as it affects and influence customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately leading to better financial performance of the organization.