The Staff Oasis: The role of staff break rooms for hospitality employees' wellbeing and performance

2017 Fiscal Year Research-status Report

• Project/Area Number: 17K13805
• Research Institution: Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University
• Principal Investigator: 齊藤 広晃 立命館アジア太平洋大学, 国際経営学部, 助教 (30794812)
• Project Period (FY): 2017-04-01 – 2021-03-31
• Keywords: Employee well-being / Hospitality Management / Service Management / HR Management / Emotional Intelligence

Outline of Annual Research Achievements

For AY2017, I undertook a number of activities for this project.
Firstly, I conducted literature review in relevant fields, including emotional labour, emotional intelligence, stress, burnout, employee-wellbeing, and characteristics of hospitality workers. With literature review, I also identified the scales that I can use for developing survey questionnaire.
With fundamental understanding of the research topic, I contacted the gatekeepers in Australia and Japan for administrating surveys later on. Four hotels showed their interests and agreed to participate in the project.
I also had face-to-face meeting with a collaborator in Australia to discuss/amend the research plan and set the timeline for each task.

Current Status of Research Progress

2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.

Reason

Although I could not attend a conference initially planned (i.e., APacCHRIE in Indonesia) and conduct a pilot study due to restrictions on time and amended budgets, I completed many other tasks specified above (i.e., conducting thorough literature review in the relevant fields, developing survey questionnaire, receiving supports from four hotels for this project, and having face-to-face meeting with my collaborator to intensively discuss the project and relevant tasks.

Strategy for Future Research Activity

In Fiscal Year 2018, I plan to undertake various activities for this project, which include participating APacCHRIE (a conference I could not participate in AY2017) to discuss my research topic with other academics. This participation will also help me to receive advice from several leading scholars in hospitality management field;
-conducting pilot surveys in Japan and Australia;
-looking for more hotels participating in my project;
-administering a real survey in Japan and Australia (I, with my collaborator in Australia, will conduct the survey at the hotels participating in this project);
-inputting the survey data into SPSS (by hiring research assistants, the collected data will be inputted into SPSS file)