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Abstract
The service industry perpetuates the notion that the customer is always right. The hospitality industry markets to guests based on the service quality. The hotel industry has historically perpetuated gender, racial and ethnic stereotyping by placing women in gendered jobs with little power, such as hotel desk agents or cleaning personnel. Guest agents, the focus of this study, encounter a range of guest behaviors that may be negative such as yelling or throwing items. How do front-desk agents relate to guests when guests misbehave? This research examined this perplexing dilemma from the women desk agents perspective. How did women of the hotel front office learn to negotiate difficult guests with regard to race and gender? The research questions included: (1) How did the nature of job status, race and gender influence how the women the negotiated guest encounters? (2) How did learning occur? and, (3) How did their experiences influence tenure and job satisfaction? Ten women from four-star and three-star hotels were interviewed using semi-structured interviews. Data were analyzed using the constant comparative method drawing on a critical human resource development (CHRD) and feminist theoretical framework. Findings indicated that women front-desk agents had learned to manage emotions of themselves and difficult guests. Conclusions of the study were: (1) The womens learning occurred through incidental and informal learning, connectedness and communities of practice; (2) The women learned to silence their voices in subservience to the guest thus fueling the myth of sovereignty; (3) The guest encounter was experienced as emotion work on a continuum along a range of personalization and depersonalization; (4) Guests may reinforce asymmetrical power relations based the desk agents gender, race, ethnicity, age, or class; and (5) Job stressors involved in relating to difficult guests may have long-term affects on wellbeing and job continuance. This research contributes to Human Resources Organizational Development in presentation of the employee viewpoint. Hotel managers should not minimize the negative impact negotiating a difficult guest has on front-desk agents. Socially conscious organizations could use these findings and conclusions to establish a precedent in the industry of protecting employees from abusive guests. Scholars may further explore how management supports, trains and promotes women hotel employees. Additionally, this study contributes to adult education with insights into womens learning.