Work-family conflict and work-family facilitation relating employee burnout during COVID-19 in Thai hotel industry

Abstract

Employee emotions and feelings are often overlooked in the hotel industry, this could not be more true since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. This is mainly due to the hotel having to make drastic cutbacks in order to survive owing to the massive decline of guests due to the closing of the international borders. This has had a huge impact on employees working from within the hotel industry. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between work-family conflict and work-family facilitation in how it can contribute to employee burnout. A quantitative approach was taken by distributing questionnaires to hotel employees working in the heavily touristm-dependent island of Phuket, Thailand. 19 hotels with a 4-5 star rating took part in the research, with 420 valid responses being collected which were then analysed by using SPSS. The results showed that both work-family conflict and employee burnout has increased drastically, whilst work-family facilitation has decreased among hotel employees during the COVID-19 crisis. The results also indicate different demographic and job characteristics that have been found to play a part in the work-family conflict of hotel employees along with significantly high burnout. Finally, the results indicated from a multiple regression model that work-family conflict and work-family facilitation both play important influencing factors in contributing to employee burnout. Hotels need to focus on human resource strategies such as employee welfare and work-family facilitation programs should be implemented to minimise work-family conflict as to avoid employees burning out.