Significant challenges are faced by front-line hospitality and tourism employees interacting with customers on a daily basis. These challenges and the ways they are dealt with form the focus of this thesis. As they interact, a range of incidents may arise from highly satisfactory encounters to service failures. It has been argued that in order to achieve satisfactory service encounters, employees need to feel in control, satisfied and motivated as well as being given appropriate assistance, information and training. Front-line employees in hospitality and tourism are focused on here due to the complex nature of the industry. It is commonly agreed that it is characterised by poor working conditions such as anti-social working hours, part-time and/or seasonal work, minimal on-the-job training and low levels of pay. These are all factors which may affect employee work satisfaction and motivation as well as recruitment and retention. The thesis is comprised of four studies. In Study I, hospitality and tourism employee work motivation is analysed. Study II examines front-line hotel restaurant employees’ experiences of service encounters. How the skills utilised by employees during these service encounters are acquired and developed is then explored in Study III. Study IV concludes by examining employee informal information sharing activities, which offer one way of developing these skills. The thesis’ findings paint a more positive picture of work and workers in hospitality and tourism than suggested in some of the earlier published research. This could be explained by the fact that the thesis utilises an employee perspective in its truest sense. The findings of the thesis show that employees are motivated (to large extent by factors that have been pointed out in earlier published work motivation research) and that they are active in the pursuit of developing skills necessary to create satisfactory service encounters. Another conclusion of the thesis’ findings is that the interaction between workers and guests in the service encounter provides an important opportunity for workers to feel satisfied at work.

The objective of this study was to understand work motivation in a sample of seasonal workers at a tourism destination strongly steered by seasonality. Furthermore, it was investigated whether seasonal workers could be divided into worker subgroups on the basis of their work motivation. A structural equations model tested Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory of work motivation empirically. The findings of the study support the Two-Factor Theory of work motivation. Furthermore, results indicated that a migrant community of workers was significantly less concerned about wage level as well as significantly more concerned about meeting new people than resident workers. As a result of these findings, it is suggested that management of businesses in hospitality and tourism need to consider that the seasonal workforce consists of different kinds of worker subgroups, which have different needs to be satisfied.

This article aims at understanding informal information sharing among a group of part-time front-line employees with short-term contracts in tourism, by adapting an external marketing concept, Word-of-Mouth communication (WOM), into an internal environment of an organization — the employee market. As a result of using this approach, insights have been made into the informal internal marketing activities and subsequent learning processes that occur through informal information sharing between employees. It is also evident that through this sharing of experiences front-line employees learn how to create successful service encounters and thereby find their roles as a part-time marketer within their organization. As a result of the findings a new concept is introduced and discussed — Internal Word-of-Mouth (IWOM).

This paper aims at understanding what happens before, during and after critical service encounters, which gives an insight into which employee skills are central for coping with such encounters in hospitality. Furthermore, the study seeks to understand how educations, vocational training and informal training affect front liners' experiences of critical service encounters. Findings show that there are three catecogies of skills that are central to employees when dealing with critical service encounters: technical ( hard), social (soft) and aesthetic( appearence) skills. These skills are mainly learnt by formal education(Technical), informal information sharing among employees (social) and interaction with guests(aesthetic).