Title

Creating And Sustaining Fun Work Environments In Hospitality And Service Organizations

Keywords

Fun; Managing work climate; Organizational culture

Abstract

Managers of hospitality and service organizations have long believed that it is critical for their employees to have fun at work. They recognize the important relationships between their employees having fun andtheir customers having a pleasant experience. While everyone accepts thisnotion, there is little empirical support for either a definition of what managers can do to promote a fun work environment or even what makes a funwork environment fun. Further, while many positive outcomes for both theindividual and the organization are claimed to be associated with fun workenvironments, there is even less empirical data to support this belief. This primary purpose of the paper is to identify and define the actions and activities that managers can do or support to create and sustain the feeling employees have that their firm is a fun place to work or have a “fun workenvironment.” The paper reports results of a large e-mail survey of humanresource managers designed to identify what cues managers send to create afun work environment, the degree to which these cues actually are associated with a work environment that is fun, and the positive individual and organizational outcomes that are claimed to be associated with working insuch an environment. The study offers definitions and measurements of thecueing process, a fun work environment, and outcomes of the process. We found a strong relationship between the antecedent cues and the degree to which the work environment was perceived as fun. The relationships between a fun work environment and various outcomes were not as strongor comprehensive. While the results of this research are positive and extendour knowledge of cues, culture and especially “fun work environments,”more needs to be done in validating the measures and extending the research. © 2005, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Publication Date

9-19-2005

Publication Title

Journal of Human Resources in Hospitality and Tourism

Volume

4

Issue

1

Number of Pages

11-30

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1300/J171v04n01_02

Socpus ID

78649626175 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/78649626175

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