The purpose of this dissertation is to create a holistic diversity management measurement scale and to analyze the impact of diversity management on employees' attitudes and behavior in the hospitality and tourism industry. Effective diversity management can have a multitude of positive outcomes in the hospitality and tourism industry. However, there is little research conducted regarding the direct and indirect impacts of diversity management on the attitudes and behavior of hospitality and tourism industry employees. This dissertation used a mixed-method approach to create a measurement scale to evaluate diversity management practices for the hospitality and tourism field. The first study of this dissertation included a scale development process using a qualitative and then a quantitative phase. Literature review and semi-structured interviews were conducted for developing the items for the diversity management scale. These items were then refined to finalize the diversity management measurement scale through a quantitative phase using exploratory factor analyses. The impact of diversity management on hospitality and tourism industry employees' job performance, service innovation behavior, and engagement were analyzed through a quantitative study using this measurement instrument. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized research model. The present research is the first of its kind in the hospitality and tourism field. The measurement scale developed in this study will expand the boundaries of diversity management research in the hospitality and tourism industry. This current research further establishes a link between diversity management and positive employee-related outcomes in the hospitality and tourism industry. The assessment of these relationships should extend the literature and open new models of academic research with additional organizational outcomes. Leaders in the hospitality and tourism industry can gain vital insight regarding the importance of effective diversity management through the study results.

International Labor Organization estimated that 40.3 million people were victims of human trafficking in 2016. The high rate of human trafficking has drawn policymakers' attention to this issue and made them enforce anti-trafficking laws and regulations. However, their legal measures have not been based on solid empirical evidence due to the lack of academic research on human trafficking. The scant research available on human trafficking has been mainly descriptive or an investigation of sex trafficking cases to provide help to survivors. Thus, there is a need for research to explore human trafficking as a human rights issue through various perspectives such as sociology and psychology and within various contexts such as hospitality and tourism. To respond to the above-mentioned need, the current research aims to examine the antecedents of hotel employees' likelihood to help the victims of human trafficking. The U.S. lodging industry is the selected setting of the current study since it is recognized as one of the top venues of human trafficking. A conceptual framework was developed and a survey-based quantitative study was conducted to test it. Data were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling. Findings showed that employees' sympathy, feelings of compassion towards the victims, is the key factor to their likelihood to help. Also, employees' familiarity with human trafficking and perceived susceptibility of the lodging industry to human trafficking play an important role in their decision-making process to help. The present study provides important theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, the study addresses the research gap by focusing on the psychological and sociological aspects of human trafficking and integrating egoism and altruism schools of thought. Practically, the study provides insights for the lodging industry practitioners on the increase of employees' prosocial tendency towards victims of trafficking.

The purpose of this study was to employ a network perspective to detect fluctuations in tourism (at the level of tourism areas and by inbound tourism markets) that co-occur with hazardous events. Specifically, the study focuses on the Air Travel Tourism (ATT) network of the Hawaiian Islands and its changes with the incidence of nine hazardous events from 2015 to 2021. The three main aspects of the ATT network, which include tourism connections, island preferences, and concentrations of inbound tourism markets were analyzed for a total of eighty-four monthly and seven annual network models. The results suggest that the network perspective provides insights that are especially applicable to the study of prolonged hazardous events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Among local hazardous events, the volcanic eruption and Hurricane Lane, both occurring in 2018, were associated with a decrease in visitors and preferences for Hawaii and Molokai Island. During the COVID-19 pandemic, uneven fluctuations were detected for all groups of the Hawaiian Islands. The peripheral islands had the most interrupted tourism connections during the pandemic period, while the core and semi-core islands had the most fluctuations in preference. International travel restrictions favored increases in concentrations of both domestic markets in Oahu Island, and only of the U.S. West market in the other islands. Interestingly, the mix of pandemic-related travel restrictions and recovery policies corresponded with asymmetrical tourism fluctuations for each island. The annual results suggested more stability in the aspects of the ATT network compared to the monthly results. The current study advances the tourism literature on hazardous events with insights from a network perspective. Additionally, the findings serve as a starting point for the development of new propositions and hypotheses to be tested in future research. In terms of practical implications, the results suggest that the network perspective may be beneficial for tourism practitioners to evaluate the differentiated results of policies issued in times of hazardous events. Furthermore, the unevenness of the detected fluctuations in the ATT network underscores the value of tailored planning, management, and marketing strategies in times of turbulence.

Hotel reward programs have been in existence for three decades. These programs were originally established as a customer relationship management tool to reward loyal guests for their patronage. Over time, there have been indications that the programs that are intended to inspire loyalty to the company have actually inspired loyalty to the program itself. The aim of this study was to analyze the antecedents of program satisfaction and program loyalty in hotels to determine the relationship between the program attributes and the impact on program loyalty. Switching costs were also analyzed to determine if they played a moderating role in the relationship between program satisfaction and program loyalty. Data was collected using an online questionnaire based upon measures from previous studies on the following variables: functional value, external value, utilitarian value, hedonic value, symbolic value, program satisfaction, switching costs, and program loyalty. Using the statistical software SPSS and SmartPLS, the data was empirically tested. The results indicated that program satisfaction is a driver of program loyalty. Switching costs did not have a statistically significant impact on the relationship between program satisfaction and program loyalty. Of great interest is the indicators of perceived value. As utilitarian value has been used as a dominant portion of reward programs in the past, in this study, it did not have a significant impact on the perceived value of the program. As the needs of customers change, it is necessary for industry to change as well. The research presented in this study has both theoretical and practical implications, as the results can provide a greater understanding of the value of hotel rewards from the customers viewpoint.

<p> Inadequate resources, poor market strategy, competition, contract regulation, and disparate performance outcomes are issues small business owners face while competing for government contracts. The purpose of this correlational study was to examine the market orientation-business performance relationship and the influence of market factors among veteran-owned small businesses competing for government contracts in the United States. A survey with adapted MARKOR and Government Regulation Lassez-Faire scales was administered to 203 veteran-owned small business owners. Resource-advantage theory served as the theoretical foundation for this study. The results of the multiple linear regression were significant, suggesting that market orientation relates to firm performance and total contract revenue. However, the regression models had a poor fit, with R² values ranging from .019 to .094, suggesting that significant results of this study lacked the power to conclude predictive accuracy. Market orientation did not significantly relate to contract bid to win rate and number of years in the government market. The PROCESS moderation analysis provided mixed results for market factors&rsquo; influence on the market orientation relationship with business performance outcomes. Study participants were market-oriented, with few seeing corresponding success. The introduction of new variables is necessary to make future models useful. Implications for positive social change include guidance for better-fitting models, ones that will inform the efforts to improve the survivability of small businesses in the B2G market. Veteran-owned small business owners should not waste resources on market orientation as a sole strategic focus for capturing and winning government contracts.</p>

The gaining popularity of Knowledge Management (KM) has been reinforced by the quest for innovation and value creation. Value creation is grounded in the appropriate combination of human networks, social capital, intellectual capital, and technology assets, facilitated by a culture of change. It is indicated that the future of KM tends to focus on the study of the impact on people in terms of value or knowledge value creation. Because of this, the positive relationship between KM and value creation has been discussed extensively in the literature. However, the majority of the studies on knowledge value creation have been widely undertaken to highlight several case studies demonstrating success in developed countries, whilst very few studies have been done in the cultural context of developing countries. These studies in developing economies have identified several distinctive features, in particular socio-cultural factors that have an important role and influence in KM practices. A call has been made for further research to explore KM in different organisational and cultural contexts in developing economies. Thailand is an example of a developing country where a number of distinctive socio-cultural features have been identified. It therefore represents an interesting case to conduct a study on the influence of these cultural features on KM practices within an organisational context. The objective of this empirical study is to explore knowledge value creation practices in a Thai organisation. The research adopts an interpretive stance and employs a case study approach involving multiple data collection methods. It is based on the researcher's personal expertise and close involvement in the selected case study organisation for over a decade. The study characterises Thai distinctive culture in terms of collectiveness, shyness, conscientiousness and seniority, and indicates that these distinctive socio-cultural features critically influence (a) the social network ties and relationships between employees within and across teams, (b) the resulting level of trust between employees, and (c) the ability to share and create knowledge effectively in the organisational socio-cultural environment. The study is limited to a Thai organisation, but can be generalised to other organisations that exhibit similar characteristics. It provides interesting insights into the socio-cultural factors affecting knowledge management adoption in a Thai organisation and a foundation to further the research on the validation of the theoretical model that emerged from this empirical study.

Exploitation of the knowledge generated by university research can bring social and economic benefits; thus, knowledge transfer between universities and industry is an important aspect of public policy. In many countries, including the United Kingdom (UK), universities have been developing the capacity to support the commercialisation of publicly funded research, typically by setting up centralised Knowledge Transfer Offices (KTOs). Previous studies have revealed that KTOs need a wide range of abilities to support the commercialisation of academic research, but our understanding of how these abilities are developed and have evolved over time remains limited. In order to address this identified gap in the literature, this thesis examines the questions: What do KTOs learn? How do KTOs learn? and Why do KTOs learn? To address these questions, the thesis adopts a practice-based view of organisational knowledge and learning. The conceptual framework developed to investigate learning by KTOs assumes that their commercialisation practice is learnt through the interactions of their staff within communities of practice, within networks of practice and across communities of practice, and that this learning can be initiated by KTO staff or by targeted strategies devised by the KTO and the university's management. This conceptual framework guides the case studies of six purposefully selected KTOs in the UK. The selection of KTOs is aimed at identifying cases with different learning patterns in order to maximise insights gained from cross-case comparisons as well as at literal replication of the findings. The analysis is based on data collected from semi-structured interviews with key staff in selected KTOs and on information from relevant documents, and follows the ‘explanation building' technique (Yin, 2009). The findings reveal that KTOs tend to develop one of two types of commercialisation practice – each of which is based on different implicit assumptions about generating science-based innovation, and associated with a different set of abilities. Moreover, the findings demonstrate the processes by which changes in practice come about, highlighting the interplay between situated learning and strategic practices of management. The results presented address the aforementioned gap in the literature on university-industry knowledge transfer and contribute to the developing situated learning theory by shedding light on how incremental and more radical changes in practice emerge. The findings should be useful to policy-makers who seek to support universities to build capability for knowledge transfer.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the hotel manager’s reaction to the increasing electricity rates in the City of Miami.

[No abstract included]

The socio-economic changes and the population growth concentrated in cities in the U.S. have resulted in increasing interest in urban life that combines living, shopping and work in one centralized location. This type of area, called a mixed-use development, meets the needs of changing American lifestyles. To build successful retail businesses in the mixed-use developments, more information must be identified concerning key retail success factors. Based upon this need, this study examined the town center mixed-use development through case studies. The scope ofthe study included identifying successful town center mixed-use developments in the U.S., identifying locations for each case study analysis, conducting surveys of retailers, consumers and property managers, and analyzing results for consistent responses. The consistent responses by retailer, consumer, and property manager perceptions of store attributes and SWOT analyses were used to determine key success factors. These key success factors were separated into development attributes, store attributes, and target consumer attributes. Although the key success factors are simple in nature, the data from all three respondent groups unite to validate and add emphasis to the review of related literature. lltilizing these key success factors can assist in differentiating the town center and individual stores front the competition and in creating a desirable environment where customers return frequently. The model can be used in the development, planning and implementation strategies for future town center mixed-use developments.