A Study Of Complaint Behavior Of Hotel Front-line Staff

Employees complain and grievance widely exists in hospitality.It refers to that due to the dissatisfaction with work,hotel staff takes a series of behavior reactions or non-behavior reactions. Front-line staffs are the hotel's window to outside and the representation of hotel image. Compared with the back of the house, the complaint behavior of front-line staffs is more representative. As a typical group in hotel, the study takes it as the research object. The study discusses the tapes, causes, the main content and influencing factors by questionnaire method, interview method and field observation.According to the study of the empirical analysis, hotel front-line staffs have common complaint behavior. Front-line staffs complaining behavior can be divided into verbal complaint behavior and actions of complaint behavior. According to different purposes and objects,verbal complaint behavior can be divided into two major categories:talk and communication. In "talk", "actor" talk and complain about the "object" to a third party to express dissatisfaction. This complain focus on the emotional catharsis, and the balance of inner sense of unfairness. With different third party "object", "talk" includes three kinds of "talk", that's colleagues talk, non-colleagues talk, and self-talk. In fact, based on the fact that some hotel managers do not attach great importance to talk and communicate with the front-line staffs, the psychological distance between them is great,which make the hotel front-line staffs choose "talk" with others to vent their dissatisfaction as their first option. "Communication" is the complaining subject and complaining object communicate and exchange thoughts about problems, and complaining subject expect a certain compensation. "Communication" supposed to be more effective that has more chance to resolve misunderstanding and concerned problems between compainling subject and objects. Since "Communication" costs and risks a lot, the hotel front-line staffs will consider whether to make use of this method based on different objects. If the complain object are colleagues, the front-line staffs favor in using" communication" to solve the problem. While the complain object is supervisor or leader who is in higher level, "communication" is rarely used. "Action of the complaint behavior" includes resignation and slack. Slack is a silent protest, the negative feedback that when complaint behavior can not be resolved. When the complaining accumulated to a certain extent,then comes the resignation. resignation is the most decisive and intense way to express dissatisfaction for the front-line staffs. The study not only classify complaints behavior about front-line staffs, but also explores the possible reasons that employees select different ways to complain.The cause of hotel front-line staffs complaining behavior includes the benefit to obtain, emotional catharsis and comfort.Emotional catharsis is the main cause for hotel front-line staffs.To a large extent, emotional catharsis can help complainers balance dissatisfaction, but it can also disseminate the complaint content.Obtaining benefit is another motivation of complaint behavior.It can stand alone, and also be mixed with the emotional catharsis. In order to get the goal, hotel front-line staffs will discreetly choose the performance way. Relatively,comfort is rare, and it mostly appears in the one-to-one process of female staffs'talk.The complaining content of hotel front-line staffs has numerous items.It not only has the general character of employees, but also has its own characteristics. Knowing from the literature,the work,the wages and welfare teatment,the human relation, and the promotion are the key complaining content for all employees. However,there still have some other complaining content for hotel fronte-line staffs, such as fairness of shift, form of work,the management of direct superior, the human resource of department, ect.There are many influencing factors for complaint behavior of hotel frontline staff, and the study describles the influence to hotel front-line staffs from individual, management, situation and environment these four aspects. Because of length and practical constraints,the individual factors only selected the personality traits, psychological needs and pressures.According to the size of scope, the management is divided into the overall management and department management.The influence of department management to the complaint behavior of hotel front-line staffs should be deeper than the overall management's. Environmental factors is a relatively large concept. According to the acceptability of hotel frontl-ine staffs, the study divides environment into the hotel external environment and the hotel internal environment. Compared with the external environment, the hotel internal environment directly affects the complaint behavior of frontline staff. Situation factor and environment factor are closely related, both of them commonly influence the complaint behavior of frontline staff.The paper is divided into five parts:The first part mainly introduces the background,the object,the purpose, the content of study. And the part refers to the structure of the paper.The second part is the literature review. It theoretically introduces the concept of employees complain,the type of complaint behavior, the motivation of complaint behavior, the content of complaint, and the influencing factors.The third part is research method. In the section, the paper establishes a research framework and research hypotheses, it also establishes the research units. This part details the data collection of survey and interview. It also appears a preliminary description of these data. Not only that, the part tests the reliability and validity of questionnaire.The forth part is the main part of the paper. The researcher uses the materials which from the survey and interview, further expounds the related aspects of the complaint behavior of hotel front-line staffs, especially the explanation of differrent performances.The fifth part is the last part of the paper. According to the analysis and discussion in the forth part, this part verified the earlier research hypothesi, and it proposed the innovation and limitation.The innovation of this study is to systematically discusses the tapes, motivation, the main content and influencing factors of the complaint behavior of hotel front-line staffs. At the same time, due to various aspects of the limit,the study exists a certain lack of representativeness in the sample data and the depth of study.