Hostility or hospitality? A review on violence, bullying and sexual harassment in the tourism and hospitality industry

Yael Ram

Current Issues in Tourism, 2018, vol. 21, issue 7, 760-774

Abstract: The present work reviews the current knowledge about violence, bullying and sexual harassment in the tourism and hospitality industry. It indicates the high prevalence of these aggressive behaviours, and identifies structural reasons, insufficient managerial skills and/or common beliefs as their causes. The negative impacts of bullying, violence and sexual harassment on employees include intentions to leave and psychological upset. These personal negative feelings and attitudes contribute to negative organizational performance indicators, such as high staff turnover rate and low profitability. In addition, the high prevalence of violence creates a negative image for the tourism and hospitality industry in general. The review shows that intervention plans are scattered in aims and time frames, focus mainly on managerial policies, and almost completely overlook immediate actions as well as guest violence. Given its importance, the low number of appropriate intervention tools, policies and agendas clearly suggests the urgent need for more research. The final section of the work provides an overview of three core themes that can potentially contribute to the development of an effective intervention agenda, namely, corporate social responsibility, social media and comparisons to other sectors.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13683500.2015.1064364 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rcitxx:v:21:y:2018:i:7:p:760-774

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rcit20

DOI: 10.1080/13683500.2015.1064364

Access Statistics for this article

Current Issues in Tourism is currently edited by Jennifer Tunstall

More articles in Current Issues in Tourism from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().