The Impact of Coping Strategies on Occupational Stress and Employees' Professional Mobility in Egyptian Hotels

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Hotel Management, Faculty of Tourism and hotel Management, Helwan University

2 Cairo Higher Institute for Hotels and Tourism, Mokattam

Abstract

Working in the hospitality industry can be stressful and that many workers are vulnerable in terms of their poor working conditions. On the other hand, people in hotel industry have to deal with customers from diversified options in all aspects. When dealing with all kind of people, the employees mind should be free and he should have stress free environment to work with. So that, people react to stress in different ways. Some coping strategies are much better than others and suffering fewer of the harmful effects of stress. One of these harmful effects is professional mobility. From this perspective, the current study seeks to measure the relationship between coping strategies of hotel employees and both occupational stress they face during their work and their professional mobility intention in hotel industry. This research reports the findings of a questionnaire survey from 207 employees in five star hotels in Cairo. This survey consisted of four 30 items based on seven-point likert scale (from strongly disagree to strongly agree) was used to measure coping strategies dimensions, occupational stress and professional mobility intention from employees' perspectives. Six hypotheses were verified and five of them were supported. The results demonstrate that employees' coping strategies appears to have a strong relationship with the occupational stress in the hotel sector. Moreover, occupational stress has a strong positive impact on Egyptian hotel employees’ professional mobility intentions.

Keywords