Employee physical appearance and quality service delivery a case of selected four star hotels in Greater Accra Region

Abstract

Employees’ physical appearance is an important commercial advantage for the hotel industries in Ghana. In the face of competition, most hotels tend to look for beautiful ladies and handsome young men to be at their front desk to attract and retain customers. The desire of hotels to recruit employees based on their physical appearance sometimes backfires if the employee does not possess the requisite skills needed for the successful performance of the job. Based on this, the study aimed at evaluating employee physical appearance and its impact on service delivery in 4-Star hotels in Greater Accra Region. Descriptive research design was adopted for this study. The study sampled 324 respondents comprising; 44 managements, and 280 customers. Purposive sampling and convenience sampling techniques were used in selecting the respondents. Questionnaires were developed to obtain the relevant information from the respondents. The study revealed that 86.8% of 4-Star hotels management consider the physical appearance of people when recruiting employees. The finding further discovered that 76.3% of customers pay attention to physical appearance of hotel employees. The study showed that customers perceived that 4-Star hotels have a good reliability of services, assurance, high tangibility and adopt proper employees’ responsive techniques in addressing their challenges. The study revealed that employee physical appearance is significant in affecting the quality service delivery at the 4-Star hotel (F(d)=69.78, p=0.000<0.01). it was concluded that 48.3% of the variations in quality service delivery at 4-Star hotels can be explained by employee physical appearance and 51.7% of variation in quality service delivery is explained by other factors that are not within the control of the research. It was recommended that managers of hotels should also put more emphasis on physical appearance during recruitment of employees and other factors which may lead to quality service delivery in order to create customer satisfaction.