different researchers (and research teams) have drawn upon different theories of
motivation and applied these to different organisational issues.
Of the 13 hospitality-specific articles identified by Simons that focus directly and
explicitly on motivation and employ theoretical approaches drawn from motivation
studies, six (Charles and Marshall 1993; Simons and Enz 1995; Siu et al. 1997;
Meudell and Rodham 1998; Wong et al. 1999; and Upchurch et al. 2000)
employed need-based approaches, three (Lee-Ross 1995, 1998a, 1998b)
employed Hackman and Oldham’s JCM, three utilised the service-specific
motivation- and performance-related construct of Discretionary Service Behaviour
(Blancero and Johnson 1997, 2001; and Simons and Roberson 2003) and one
(Chitiris 1990) was loosely structured around the standard internal/external
forces definition of work motivation.
Of the approaches and findings described above, two constructs are of particular
relevance for this work. Firstly, as discussed above, the DSB construct will be
used as a measure of group performance. Secondly, following its emergence
from the review of the leadership-related hospitality literature, the re-occurence
of social support as a significant variable in the motivation-related studies of both
Lundberg et al. (2009) and Lee-Ross (1995, 1998a, 1998b) reinforces the
rationale for the inclusion of this as a factor in current study. More details on the
social support factor are provided in Section 5.2 below.
The needs-based, forced hierarchical ranking approach based on Kovach (1980,
1987) and Lindahl (1949) is not relevant to this research because of the
leadership-centric focus of this study. That is, the focus of this research is on
evaluating the de facto contributors (see Figure 4 - 3 ) to job performance in
hospitality service work rather than evaluating employees’ desired job
characteristics.
Regarding Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory, some elements of this are covered in
this research (on the Hygiene side: Supervision, Relationship with Supervisor,
Relationship with Peers; and on the Motivators/Growth side: Recognition,
Advancement and Satisfaction with Work Itself) however the inclusion of these
variables is informed primarily by leadership theory and the individual items which
are used to measure these variables are spread throughout the various factors
being employed in this research.