Development of competency scale for hospitality industry: Single multiphase mixed method research

The main contributor of business success in the hospitality and tourism sector is the capacity to attract, retain and develop competent employees. Current business environment recognizes assessment of available and future competencies as a basic Human Resources function to survive and thrive in the competitive market. Tourism and hospitality industry is focused on guest satisfaction which is directly linked to the competence of the human resources who is an inseparable contributor of production and execution of services. Effectively defining, measuring, managing and developing competencies is essential to maintain competitiveness of hospitality industry and yet there is a lack of clarity in the conceptual framework of sector specific competencies for tourism and hospitality. This research aims to develop and validate measurement tool for competencies required in the context of Tourism Hotel Management by using single multi-stage mixed method study. The first phase of the research utilizes convergent parallel design fully integrated variant followed by operations research in the second stage. The first phase targets developing and validating measurement tool providing the highest resolution of measurement and interpretation capacity by using qualitative and quantitative methods in parallel. The second stage of the research uses DEMATEL technique to understand the hierarchy of the competency dimensions and also measure the degree and direction of the hierarchical relations. The measurement tool as the product of this research provides clarity for definition and classification of competencies required for the hospitality sector. The measurement tool developed not only serves as recruitment and selection tool for hospitality companies but also produces a competency heat map for strategic human resources planning and management. The heatmap presents weak and strong points for succession planning, training and education requirements of existing human resources and sets the benchmarks for future recruitments.