THE IMPACT OF BENEFITS AND SERVICES ON MANAGER ENGAGEMENT AND MANAGER RETENTION IN TOURISM INDUSTRY: ENHANCED BY THE EFFECT OF MANAGEMENT LEVEL

Manager engagement and retention are vital to the success and organizational performance of many service sector organisations. Maintaining manager retention is a major challenge that many hotel enterprises face today. It is critical that organizations give greater importance to manager engagement, motivation and retention and therefore establish an efficient benefits and services strategy for retaining these core managers for the persistence and achievement of the organization. Employee motivation and retention have gained even more significance as a result of the heightened dynamism in hotel business within the tourism sector. As the focal point of Turkish economy, recent developments in the tourism and hotel enterprises have caused organizations to accelerate their human resources activities and accordingly more attention has been given to the employee satisfaction practices in this industry. Herzberg, in his hygiene-motivation theory, classifies the factors that maintain job satisfaction under two groups as motivating and hygiene factors 1. Herzberg says that benefits and services are hygiene factors but they do not have motivating effect. Mottaz (1985:375), in his study conducted among 1385 service sector employees in the USA, indicated that motivating (intrinsic) factors have greater effect on employee motivation than hygiene (extrinsic) factors. DeVoe and Iyengar (2004:47), in their study conducted among 1760 service sector employees of a global company operating in Northern USA, Asia and Latin America demonstrated similar results. Brislin et.al., (2005:97), with their study conducted among 623 service and different sector employees in Japan also indicated that motivating (intrinsic) factors have greater effect on employee motivation than hygiene (extrinsic) factors. This study, in contrary, aims to identify and study the effect of benefits and services on manager engagement and retention in hotel organizations in Turkey. The study was conducted among three different levels of hotel management, namely, top level, middle level and operational level managers. The results of the study show that while there is a positive and significant relationship between Benefits and Services and Management Engagement, there is no relationship between Benefits and Services and Management Retention.