Proceedings of the 19th International Academic Conference, Florence

DEVELOPING A SURVEY ON AESTHETIC LABOUR: WOMEN FRONTLINE EMPLOYEES

OMER AKGUN TEKIN, ESRA YILMAZ, RABİA MERYEM YILMAZ

Abstract:

All kinds of organizations have recently focused on being a part of unstable market and as a shareholder, increasing their shares in their markets. Especially, hospitality managements as being parts of highly competitive market and having a very tentative element such as “human” have an aim to provide full satisfaction of their customers. Protecting their brand urges them to search for new trends to differ their service systems and that causes an increase in their expectations from employees. One of them is having employees that have eligible physical properties and attitudes. Nowadays, hospitality managements pay attention to physical properties of a front line employee especially in the recruitment process. They look for a person who is looking good and sounding right. Finding an employee with perfectible properties is the first step that must be fulfilled. Then, through selection and training, managements modify and develop employees ‘abilities and attributes and convert them into aesthetic abilities. This, a creation of the management, the style of an employee with new abilities and attributes is called as aesthetic labour. The aim of this research is to reveal women frontline employees’ efforts while being an aesthetic labour. Departing from that, a questionnaire was developed under the light of international studies as there are few studies in national literature. A pilot implementation was conducted in 5 star hotels in Antalya, Turkey. As one of the noble seashore and having many 5 star hotels, Antalya is chosen for pilot implementation. 150 questionnaires were disturbed, 130 of them were collected. In order to conduct a reliable survey, 12 of them were eliminated as being fulfilled by other employees rather than frontline. 118 questionnaires were used to verify the data. Factor analysis was conducted to prove the dimensions predicted. 52 questionnaire items predicted within six factors were proven as 37 items within 6 factors. Factors are labelled as “Aesthetic Labour Requirements in Recruitment, Organizational Codes on Aesthetic Labour within Working Hours, Trainings on Becoming an Aesthetic Labour, Being an Aesthetic Labour in Customer Interactions, Effort to Preserve Aesthetic Labour Identity in Time off Work, Evaluations of Employees on Being an Aesthetic Labour.” According to the reliability analysis, the survey’s Cronbach Alpha value is 0.94. As there is few quantitative studies on aesthetic labour, this study takes a preliminary step for composing a questionnaire used for further researches both by national and international researchers.

Keywords: Developing a Survey, Aesthetic Labour, Women Frontline Employees

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2015.019.136

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