The hospitality industry is fundamentally a people business. While technology, infrastructure, and branding shape competitive positioning, it is employees—through their attitudes, behaviors, and emotional engagement—who ultimately determine service quality, guest satisfaction, and organizational reputation. Yet hospitality work is also characterized by high labor intensity, emotional demands, workforce diversity, and persistent challenges related to turnover, well-being, and skill development. These realities make Human Resource Management not merely a support function, but a strategic imperative for hospitality organizations.
This book is written in response to the growing need for a coherent, theory-driven, and practice-oriented understanding of Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) in hospitality contexts. Drawing on established and contemporary research, the book integrates foundational theories—including the Resource-Based View, Service–Profit Chain, Job Characteristics Model, Job Demands–Resources framework, Socio-Technical Systems theory, and the Technology Acceptance Model—with current industry practices shaped by digital transformation, analytics, and artificial intelligence. By doing so, it bridges the persistent gap between HR theory and the operational realities of hospitality organizations.
The book is designed for multiple audiences. For students of hospitality management and human resources, it provides conceptual clarity, structured frameworks, and applied insights that support learning and critical thinking. For academics and researchers, it synthesizes key debates, highlights emerging research directions, and situates hospitality HRM within broader strategic management discourse. For industry practitioners and leaders, it offers evidence-based managerial takeaways that can be translated into actionable HR strategies aligned with service excellence and employee sustainability.
Rather than viewing employees as a controllable cost or technology as a standalone solution, this book adopts a human-centered perspective. It emphasizes that effective HR systems, leadership practices, and digital tools must be designed around employee experience, fairness, and well-being to achieve meaningful adoption and long-term impact. In an era where hospitality organizations face rapid technological change, labor shortages, and rising service expectations, the future of the industry will depend on how successfully organizations integrate people, technology, and strategy.
Author(s)
Dr. Mahasweta Ghosh
NSHM, Durgapur, India.
ISBN 978-81-999106-2-1 (Print)
ISBN 978-81-999106-7-6 (eBook)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.9734/bpi/mono/978-81-999106-2-1
The hospitality industry is fundamentally a people business. While technology, infrastructure, and branding shape competitive positioning, it is employees—through their attitudes, behaviors, and emotional engagement—who ultimately determine service quality, guest satisfaction, and organizational reputation. Yet hospitality work is also characterized by high labor intensity, emotional demands, workforce diversity, and persistent challenges related to turnover, well-being, and skill development. These realities make Human Resource Management not merely a support function, but a strategic imperative for hospitality organizations.
This book is written in response to the growing need for a coherent, theory-driven, and practice-oriented understanding of Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) in hospitality contexts. Drawing on established and contemporary research, the book integrates foundational theories—including the Resource-Based View, Service–Profit Chain, Job Characteristics Model, Job Demands–Resources framework, Socio-Technical Systems theory, and the Technology Acceptance Model—with current industry practices shaped by digital transformation, analytics, and artificial intelligence. By doing so, it bridges the persistent gap between HR theory and the operational realities of hospitality organizations.
The book is designed for multiple audiences. For students of hospitality management and human resources, it provides conceptual clarity, structured frameworks, and applied insights that support learning and critical thinking. For academics and researchers, it synthesizes key debates, highlights emerging research directions, and situates hospitality HRM within broader strategic management discourse. For industry practitioners and leaders, it offers evidence-based managerial takeaways that can be translated into actionable HR strategies aligned with service excellence and employee sustainability.
Rather than viewing employees as a controllable cost or technology as a standalone solution, this book adopts a human-centered perspective. It emphasizes that effective HR systems, leadership practices, and digital tools must be designed around employee experience, fairness, and well-being to achieve meaningful adoption and long-term impact. In an era where hospitality organizations face rapid technological change, labor shortages, and rising service expectations, the future of the industry will depend on how successfully organizations integrate people, technology, and strategy.