A research on contractual relationship between hotel investors and professional manager

The relationships between investors and professional managers have multi-dimensional and complex structure in hotels. It is significant to make a firm agency relationship between sides for the success of businesses. It's essential to determine and get under control the variances affecting the process in order to minimize the problems confronted in the ageny process. This study aims to investigate the relationships between the investors and managers in hotels in the perspective of agency theory. In the field research of this study, quantitative and qualitative methods were used together. Survey method was used to collect the quantitative data. The data were collected from the hotel investors and hotel managers who are the members of The Association of Tourism Investors and 134 participants were reached. Frequency, percentage, Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used for the analysis of the quantitative data. Following the quantitative research; it has been stated that the structure of traditional family business dominates most of the hotels and the agency relationships are established under the influence of the organizational factors rather than the personal characteristics. One of the notable results is that the rate of making a written agreement between the sides is low and most of the agreements are labor agreements and behavior-based. It has also been stated that ethics is the most important dimension for the two sides in the agency process. The interview questions and themes used in the qualitative part are composed at the end of the quantitative research. The qualitative data were collected by face-to-face interview method. Snowball sampling method was used to determine the interviewers and 36 participants were reached in this process. The data collected were evaluated by content analysis. In respect of the analysis results, the most notable agency problem is not only authorisation and adverse selection but also asymmetry of information and moral hazard problems. Additionally, it is also pointed out that the agency relationships don't meet the expectations of the sides in hotels and the solutions recommended by agency theorists are not approved so much. Keywords: Hotel Management, Agency Theory, Agency Relationships, InvestorProfessional Manager Relationships