A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Award of the Degree of Master of Business Administration (MBA-Corporate Management) of Mzumbe University
The underlying thesis of this study is the recognition that hotels, just as is the case in all the other subsectors of the wider tourism industry, require adequate competent and high performing personnel capable of sustaining high performance levels for a long period for them to satisfy the expectations of their customers (to be effective). And once the competent (knowledgeable and skilled) personnel have been identified and recruited, the leadership of hotels needs to help the workers to adopt to their hospitality work and to ensure that their skills and knowledge are kept updated through the use of effective human resource management practices such as professional development and staff motivation. The objective of this study is to assess the effectiveness of employees at two hotels in Mbeya city. Using the multiple-case study design within the qualitative research paradigm, the study had initially planned to use multiple data collecting methods to collect data from the selected hotels. However, due to the problem that for the three of the five hotels research consent had been refused, whereas for the other two (JM and ML) access was so restricted, only the questionnaire method was used to collect data. The data were collected from 38 respondents drawn from all departments to enhance validity. The study established that the human resource capacity of the two hotels is very low and therefore, it is ineffective. The study further established that the ineffectiveness in the human resource capacity of the two hotels originates from ineffective human resource management practices employed by the leadership of the two hotels. It is therefore recommended that, hotel owners should not take staff training as a cost to their organization; they need to train employees in order to equip them with proper skills and knowledge for them to be competent in the industry. Owners of hotels should take employees as assets because this industry it‟s all about people serving people, and it takes a happy and motivated employee to make a happy customer.