CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
The hotel industry is a significant part of the tourism industry worldwide and its employees play a key role in delivering the service to customers. The motivation of employees, whether professional, skilled or unskilled, is a major issue in all service organizations. For the hotel industry, employee motivation is a major issue. It is a challenge for the hotel industry to motivate employees, to stay on the job, and to offer the efficient, good service which customers expect. The purpose of this study is to evaluate employee motivation and productivity in the hospitality industry. Inadequate motivation in hospitality industry in Ikeja Central Business District, Lagos, Nigeria is not fully addressed; opportunities for profitable investment, success or high productivity may not be met by the hotels at the end of a set period without adequately addressing employee motivation. In Nigeria, the hotel industry is one of the major industries that play an important role the country’s socioeconomic development (Wafula, Korir, and irong, 2015).
Whereas the productivity (performance) of hotels is hinged on provision of quality service to customers, the challenge is to create motivated employees who can facilitate that endeavour. Therefore, job satisfaction plays a key role in the hotel industry (Dalton, 2003). Hence there is need for this study to evaluate employee motivation and productivity in the hospitality industry. Satisfied employee can provide good service for customers, thus increasing their loyalty to the hotel; as the customer is the most important key to organizational performance in the hotel industry.
The hotel industry depends on employees to achieve their goals, implying that managers must consider employee job satisfaction because employee job satisfaction is related to service quality and work performance. Therefore, hotels must attract, develop, motivate and retain satisfied employees (Wafula et al, 2015). This requires managers’ deeper understanding regarding the employee needs, aspirations, attitudes and concerns. Hence need to study on the appropriate extrinsic motivation that enhances employee productivity and performance in an organization.
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The service sector in Nigeria is constantly growing, especially for tourism industry. Indeed, tourism industry has greatly contributed to the economy growth in Nigeria. In the last few years, the number of tourists is keep increasing along with mass promotion activities that are actively promoting Nigeria tourism.
However, organizations do not lay emphasis on the importance of understanding and applying various proper motivational techniques in designing and creating an environment for performance leading to productivity. Therefore, workers leave organization due to the fact that they are not motivated enough. Some are not willing to leave because they are enjoying some benefit in terms of promotion, which leads to increase in salaries and wages, bonus and some other incentives.
The workers of hotels in Ikeja Central Business District, Lagos, Nigeria will prefer financial incentives to non financial incentives, more especially the junior workers, due to the fact that such incentives are not used as a motivational technique, the companies have the problem and challenges of retention of their employees. Hence low performance and productivity becomes the end result and finally work dissatisfaction.