Study Of Inducements And Countermeasures Of Hotel Employees’ Career Plateau Based On Learned Helplessness Theory

Learned helplessness is the mental states and actions that people will result inhelplessness and lose their confidences while they suffer from frustrations and failures. Whenhotel employees suffer from frustrations and failures, and they ascribe these consequences tointernal, stable and controlled personal factors (e.g. introversion, mental sub-normality, lackof working capacity, etc) and organizational factors (e.g. inefficient incentive measures, fixedsalary systems, disharmonious interpersonal relationships, etc), they may have a strong senseof helplessness. Thus, people will lose their working enthusiasm, decrease their futureexception, which may have a strong negative influence on their career.Career plateau is a special stage in the enterprise employees’ occupation careers. It is alack of occupation change, an Individual occupation career peak, the Relative termination ofwork responsibilities and challenges, and a sort of lag period of one’s career. For employeesin hotels which are the pyramid organizations, the space of promotion and the degrees ofimportance of employees are becoming narrow. That is, hotel employees may produce “careerplateau” more easily.In the hotel organizations, the learned helplessness that emplyees produce will have anegative effect on their working efficeincies and results, even affect their healthy developmentof career. Of course, it also will have an influence on their career plateau which is a specialstage of career. Therefore, based on learned helplessness theory and hotel employees’ researchperspective, the purpose of this study is to test the relationships of the factors of learnedhelplessness and the factors of inducements and countermeasures of hotel employees’ career plateau and to put forward many effective strategies to eliminate the phenomenon of theircareer plateau through the quantitative study of inducements and countermeasures of theircareer plateau.The data was collected through questionnaires in four five-star hotels in Ningbo,Zhejiang Province. There are420samples to be given out and352effective samples to beanalyzed in total. By using the validity test and the reliability test, Exploratory FactorAnalysis and Multi-regression Analysis, the analysis conclusions of this study are given asfollows:(1) The Exploratory Factor Analysis and Reliability and Validity Analysis in hotelemployees’ learned helplessness had been grouped into4factors: feeling helplessness,behaviour helplessness, cognition helpless and motivation helplessness.The Factor Analysisand Reliability and Validity Analysis in influencing factors of the hotel employees’ careerplateau had been grouped into5factors: organizational payment inducement, individual stateinducement, social culture inducement, organizational structure inducement and individualability inducement. The Factor Analysis and Reliability and Validity Analysis in measures ofthe hotel employees’ career plateau had been grouped into3factors: organizational structurecountermeasure, organizational culture countermeasure and individual developmentcountermeasure.(2) This study adopted T-test and One-way ANOVA to test the differences of learnedhelplessness and the inducements and countermeasures of career plateau among the differentDemographic Characteristics of hotel employees. Results indicated that hotel employees hadsignificant differences on a large number of learned helplessness and the inducements of career plateau, and had siginificant differences on a few of the countermeasures of careerplateau.(3) This study adopted Liner Multi Regression Analysis to test the relationships betweenthe factors of learned helplessness and the factors of inducements and countermeasures ofhotel employees’ career plateau. Results found that there is a significant positive correlationbetween most factors of learned helplessness and factors of inducements of hotel employees’career plateau, and a significant negative correlation between most factors of learnedhelplessness and factors of countermeasures of hotel employees’ career plateau.Finally, based on those conclusions, this study had put forward many effective strategiesand some deficiencies.