MGT262H1S Job Satisfaction & Organizational Commitment

Submitted To: Professor S. Ct Professor P. Heslin Submitted On: March 24, 2003

Table of Contents Report Section

I. II. III. Executive Summary Introduction Method 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. IV.

Page
1 2-4

. .

Description of Organization Contact Person

4-5 5 5-6 6-7 7-8

Description of Sample Description of Measures

Description of Data Collection Procedure .. ... ... ...

Analysis of Data 1. 2. 3.

Job Satisfaction

8-9 9 9-10

Organizational Commitment Correlation

...

V.

Conclusion .. 1. 2. 3. Job Satisfaction, Organizational Commitment, And Correlatio.. Recommendations for Managers .. 10-11 11-12 12-13

Recommendations for Employees . ..

VI.

Appendices 1. 2. 3. 4.

Appendix I: Job Satisfaction Questionnaire. Organizational Commitment Questionnaire. Appendix II: Limitations. Appendix III: Interview with Contact Person Appendix IV: Data Analysis and Statistics.

14 15-16 17-18

VII.

References

I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment. We chose to study this issue on Sleep Wells Seattle branch, the Downtown Hotel. Employees productivity is largely related to their level of job satisfaction and in fact, the turnover rate can be reduced with a higher level of organizational commitment. Therefore, it is important for an organization to study the relationships between these two variables. A survey was made available on the web to collect the information for demographic, job satisfaction and organizational commitment of each employee. Altogether, thirty-two employees responded to the survey. The results from the survey on job

satisfaction were compared to the results reported for the level of organizational commitment. After analyzing the data, we found that there is a relatively strong correlation between job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Generally speaking, higher level of job satisfaction will lead to higher level of organizational commitment.

II. INTRODUCTION Employees are one of the most important determinants and leading factors that determine the success of an organization in a competitive environment. This is especially true for service organizations that rely heavily on their good behavioural employees to provide friendly and courteous services to their customers in this competitive environment. The organization selected for our project is the worlds largest hotel chain, Sleep Well, where our focus will be on its Seattle branch, the Downtown Hotel. The purpose of our research is to determine whether feelings of job satisfaction would lead to organizational commitment by employees. Job satisfaction refers to a

collection of attitudes that workers have about their jobs1. These attitudes may derive from a facet of satisfaction or as an overall aspect of the job; however, the focus of our study is on job satisfaction in the most general term. It is very important to study whether employees are satisfied, because it is intuitively believed that workers who are more satisfied will likely exhibit more positive feelings, thoughts, and actions toward their job. Similarly, studying about whether employees are committed to the organization that they work for is important. By definition, organizational commitment refers to an attitude that reflects the strength of the linkage between an employee and an organization 2 . The level of commitment has implications as to whether a person would stay with an organization. Commitment can be identified as three very different types, which include: affective, continuance and normative. However, in this study, the focus will be on commitment in the most general term. Organizational commitment can be ranked as: high, moderate, or low. Thus, managers are interested in maximizing their workers level of commitment.

Gary Johns, Alan M.Saks, Understanding and Managing Life at Work Organizational Behaviour (Toronto: Addison Wesley Longman, 2001), p. 110 2 Ibid, p. 123

It is important to study the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment, because this project will help managers to understand how people work and study general organizational behaviours. The main interest of our research is to investigate whether a hotel employees job satisfaction will affect his or her level of commitment in the organization. This is of particular interest for Sleep Well Downtown Hotel, because the costs of hiring and training new employees are high. Therefore, the company should try to keep a constant workforce, which also helps to reduce the risks of deterioration in services offered to its customers. Generally, it is expected that employees are more likely to stay with their organization and be highly committed when they can see a strong linkage between the organization and their work. When employees experience low job satisfaction and organizational commitment, it can be very costly especially since the hotel industry has an extremely high turnover rate. This may be a result of low pay (for lower level positions) and little opportunity for advancement. Absenteeism may also be a very costly issue because it can result in reduced productivity when lowly committed employees do not see any link between the tasks they do and the organizations profitability. To solve the problems of high turnover and absenteeism, it is important to analyze the two variables being studied and determine the factors that would affect commitment. At times, employees may not leave an organization even when they are dissatisfied or do not feel committed to the organization. This makes studying the two variables serve an even greater importance. When workers are dissatisfied, this may create grievances, which can lead to a lower level of organizational commitment. In turn, this may result in severe consequences such as labour strikes. Another reason why we are interested in studying whether job satisfaction would lead to organizational commitment is because this may increase productivity. With an improvement in productivity, organizations will operate better

and have higher growth, which is an important goal for most organizations. Thus, a manager should investigate their employees level of satisfaction, which can signal whether there is commitment from their workers. Analyzing the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment is particularly crucial nowadays, as people often do not work at the same organization or job throughout their lifetime. It is also sometimes hard to find suitable people for certain positions. So once an ideal candidate is chosen, organizations will like to make a great effort to retain those employees. If two employees exhibit different levels of job satisfaction and that job satisfaction can be proven to lead to organizational commitment, the employer will likely hire the employee with the higher level of job satisfaction. This is because the employer can expect the more satisfied individual to stay with the organization. Another reason as to why satisfaction will lead to commitment is that a higher level of job satisfaction may lead to a better family life and a reduction in stress 3 . The reason is because an employees feelings of jobs satisfaction may affect his or her emotions. This feeling will affect the workers behaviours inside and outside the organization. When a worker is dissatisfied with his or her job, the employee may have negative emotions. The consequence is that he or she may start to think about quitting. The decision process will begin with the individual identifying and evaluating alternatives, about whether to quit or to stay on in their job. The sequence of decisions will change the employees commitment level. Managers would be most interested in knowing about the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment, because it would become clear as to how important and worthy it would be to retain their most satisfied employees. In turn, having this knowledge would motivate managers to satisfy their employees. This would

Bob Delaney. Alternative Work Arrangements: Do The Make Economic Sense?. http://www.hrpao.org/files/octoberfeature1.pdf

ultimately benefit the organization, as it is expected that these same employees will be highly committed. When employees are committed, their personal goals may go in line with those of the organization that they work for. If our study shows that job satisfaction and organizational commitment are related, organizations would only need to increase one variable (job satisfaction) to achieve the positive effect of the other (organizational commitment). For example, a company could reward workers with job advancement opportunities or change a facet of the job in a desirable way, which will increase job satisfaction and ultimately lead to a higher level of organizational commitment. III. METHOD Description of Organization: Sleep Well International Inc. is the worlds largest hotel chain4 with more than 4,000 independent hotels. Based in the USA, Sleep Wells hotels are located in approximately eighty countries throughout North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and in the South Pacific. However, each individual Sleep Well hotel is uniquely designed to reflect the appeal of its local culture. Sleep Well was established in 1988 by Mr. Boss and had begun as an informal referral system. In 1990, Canadian hotel owners joined the system and Sleep Well then began to take the first steps toward its global expansion. By 1992, Sleep Well dropped its referral organization image and eliminated the word "motel" from its name, and began to compete with other full-service lodging chains. In 2001, Sleep Well achieved huge success as its sales hit $140 million in this record year. By the end of 2002, Sleep Well had 1,137 properties in

William S. Gray, Salvatore C. Ligurori . Hotel and Motel Management and Operations. (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, Inc, 2003), p. 359

the United States and 112 properties in Canada. Indeed, Sleep Well has become the largest single-branded hotel chain in Canada. Our study will be focused on the Seattle branch of Sleep Well, the Downtown Hotel. It is a 16-story boutique hotel with about 110 employees5. The makeup of its employees are 18% Asian, 43% Hispanic, and 39% American. Contact Person: The contact person of our group project is the Sleep Well Downtown Hotels general manager. After graduating from College, he worked on different positions at four different Sleep Well hotel branches. With eight years of working experience and valuable knowledge about the hotel business, Mr. Manager is very familiar with the operations and functions of the hospitality industry. Indeed, his experience is very rich in the dealing with relationships between his employees and the hotel. He has provided very useful information for our project, and we have been able to contact him through email and telephone. Description of Sample: For our study, there were thirty-two participants, where only fifteen respondents voluntarily responded to the questions in the demographics section. Please refer to Appendix IV for a complete summary of the data that was collected. Among the fifteen respondents, ten are women and five are men, as seen in Figure 1. The ages of our participants range from the lowest of age twenty to the highest of age sixty-one, with the average being age thirtyfour (Figure 2). The proportion of people whose primary language is English was 60%, while 33% speak Spanish, and 7% speak Tagalong, as shown in Figure 3. As Figure 6 shows, about 67% of the workers were born in the United States, while 20% in Mexico, and 7% in each of South Korea and the Philippines. Furthermore from Figure 7, nearly 74% of our samples grew up in the United States, while 13% were raised in Mexico, 7% in Europe, and

6% in the Philippines. It is found that the level of education obtained from our sample tends to vary greatly as seen in Figure 4. Approximately 7% have completed some high school, 13% have finished high school, 7% have obtained a technical degree, 33% have some university background, 27% have a Bachelors degree, and 13% have a Masters degree. In Figure 5, 27% of the employees work less than thirty hours per week, 47% work between thirty-one to forty hours, and 26% work over forty-one hours a week. In Figure 8, 60% of the employees work in direct contact with the customers. These positions include front desk agents, bell people, and housekeepers. The rest of the employees are managers in corporate sales and in room divisions (34%), and 6% are marketing directors. Description of Measures: The questions that were used to measure our two variables, job satisfaction and organizational commitment, can be found in Appendix I. There are three parts to our survey. The first part refers to the demographics of our participants, where they are asked about their gender, age, native language, country of origin, and education level. In the second part, there are five questions relating to job satisfaction. There are many ways to measure job satisfaction. One common technique is the use of Job Descriptive Index (JDI), which focuses on the five facets of satisfaction. Workers were asked to respond to a particular word or phrase in a "yes", "no" or "?" manner. For our study, we used an index of job satisfaction developed by A. H. Brayfield and H. F. Rothe. Respondents were simply asked to indicate their agreement with the above items on a scale ranging from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree". To simplify the scoring system, we modified the scale slightly from a 7-point scale to a 5-point scale. A score less than the mean of overall job satisfaction 3.6 (see Figure 14 in Appendix IV) implies low job satisfaction, while a score greater than 3.6 indicates high job satisfaction.
5

Mr. Desmond Manager, March 13, 2003.

Furthermore, the third component of our survey is comprised of ten sentences regarding organizational commitment. In this part of the survey, we are using the

questionnaires developed by Mowday, Steers, and Porter. Workers were to indicate whether they agree with these sentences that corresponds to the perceptions of their existence in the company using a scale. The scale which range from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree, measures the degree to which employees are attached or committed to their organization. A score less than the mean of overall organizational commitment 3.7 (see Figure 14 in Appendix IV) implies low commitment while a score greater than 3.7 indicates high commitment. Description of Data Collection Procedures: In order to collect the data that is required for this study, our group has engaged and made use of the correlation research technique. This is a research method that is being used, because we are attempting to measure the two variables of job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and the relationship that exists between the two. The key of this research is that our group has developed a survey, which allowed us to analyze the relationship, without introducing any changes into the setting of our research6. With the purpose of being able to collect the data from our sample of employees working at the Seattle branch of Sleep Well, our group has put together a set of questions that would allow us to analyze the relationship between the two variables that are being studied. The survey used for our study is made up of three sections: demographics, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Each sections are made up of several questions, put

together from survey sources that were made available on the MGT262H course website and textbook.

Gary Johns, Alan M.Saks, Understanding and Managing Life at Work Organizational Behaviour (Toronto: Addison Wesley Longman, 2001), p. 562.

When the questions that our group wanted to use were ready and approved, the survey was then made available through the website

(http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=47977177705) which Professor Ct has uploaded our survey on. Mr. Desmond Manager, the general manager of Sleep Well Downtown Hotel was then notified about its availability. Mr. Manager is our contact person and takes on the role of helping us to ask fifty of his employees to participate in the online survey. In the beginning, there were very few respondents for our survey. This was a problem because most of the employees at the hotel do not have access to the Internet and are non-English speakers. However, after learning that our project was to be due soon, Mr Manager was very helpful and made special arrangements for his employees to take part in our survey, so that not having access to the Internet would not be a problem anymore. However, only a total of thirty-two employees responded to our survey and then Mr. Manager sent the results to us by courier. At first, it is believed that the respondents to our survey should provide us with results that are most representative of these employees, as it is a survey that employees can engage in anonymously. However, because of technical problems with the surveys website, it is believed that there may be some limitations associated with the results that were obtained regarding an employees perceptions of their feelings toward their level of job satisfaction and organizational commitment from this study. IV. ANALYSIS OF DATA Job Satisfaction: Overall, the level of job satisfaction was considered to be favourable among employees at Downtown Hotel. The average score of all respondents was about 3.6 out of 5. The highest and lowest level of job satisfaction reported by the respondents was 4.8 and 2.2 respectively. However, it can be concluded that the employees tend to be fairly satisfied with their work, as revealed by the mean of 3.6 obtained in the respondents. On the other hand,

though the mean for workers who are enthusiastic about their work most of the time was relatively high (3.7), there was equal agreement that each day of work seems like it will never end. Perhaps the majority of participants were housekeepers and front desk agents; therefore, their repetitive work might contribute negative feelings of job satisfaction in this area. The mean score is 3.4 that signify the level of enjoyment of the employees work and a score of 3.6 represents the employees unpleasantness in their work. These results are summarized in the bar graph (Figure 9) of the Appendix. Organizational Commitment: Overall, the level of organizational commitment was considered to be favourable among employees at Sleep Well Downtown Hotel. The mean score of all employees organizational commitment is 3.7 out of 5. The mean scores for each question of the organizational commitment section can be found in Figure 10 of Appendix IV. The lowest and highest means of organizational commitment as reported by respondents are 2.4 and 5 respectively. Moreover, the data gathered do reveal that people tend to care about the organizations fate; this was supported by the fact that the mean was 4.3 for question 10. For questions 5, 6, 8, and 9, when there is a lower reported score, this would indicate a higher level of organizational commitment. In order to keep the statistic analysis meaningful, the scale for questions 5, 6, 8 and 9 as reported by the respondents are reversed, where the new scale equals to six minus the original scale. As for the rest of the questions, the higher the number reported by the respondents, the higher level of organizational commitment. However, special attention should be paid to the mean scores for questions 5 and 6, which is 3.2 each. Anyhow, employees did indicate some intention to quit. The reason for this is probably that most of the respondents are housekeepers in the sample. The work of housekeeping may not be very interesting nor be any different with other hotels. It shows

that the majority of the respondents have a level of organizational commitment greater than the mean score for organizational commitment, which is 3.7. Correlation between Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment: Figure 13 of Appendix IV shows the correlation between job satisfaction and job commitment. The level of job satisfaction is measured at the x-axis and the level of job commitment at the y-axis. Assuming job commitment is a dependent variable for job satisfaction, we tried to find how much commitment people would have for the Downtown Hotel as a result of satisfaction that they have for their job. As the graph shows, the correlation of the employees level of job satisfaction and organizational commitment is positive at the Downtown Hotel. This is evident when employees experience higher job satisfaction, they will also experience higher organizational commitment. When all of the employees are divided into two groups, it can be seen that those whose score is below our samples mean can be defined as a group with low satisfaction, while those who scored higher than the sample mean would be categorized from the high satisfaction group. Similarly, the samples can also be divided and classified as either lowly or highly committed. As the graph shows, the mean for low satisfaction group, high satisfaction group, low commitment group and high commitment group are 2.98667, 4.164706, 3.34667 and 4.035294 respectively. At Sleep Well Downtown Hotel, when people are in the low satisfaction group, their commitments are higher than their satisfaction. Conversely, when people are in high satisfaction group, their commitments are lower than their satisfaction. However, the most important point of this graph is that higher job satisfaction group has the higher job commitment to the organization.

V. CONCLUSION

Conclusion of Analysis of Data: People who reported an average score of greater than or equal to 3.6 indicate that they are relatively satisfied with their jobs. The sample contains 68% employees who are of high status, such as general manger and sales manager. On the other hand, 24% of the jobs are primarily comprised of workers who have lower positions, which include housekeepers and bell people. One reason that may give rise to our results is that managers have a

substantial amount of power. This can serve as a signal for high competence. Moreover, front-line workers are required to deal with customers often in a face-to-face situation and in a timely manner. The busy work environment coupled with demanding customers may induce a feeling of low satisfaction. Satisfied employees tend to be more loyal to their organization. Generally, when people are satisfied with their jobs, they will have a positive attitude feeling about their jobs. In their minds, other jobs would not be better than the current one. Therefore, it is unlikely that they will change their jobs. Employees prefer to stay in their company and work hard for a return. If employees feel that the company treats them fairly or well, the workers will feel that they are responsible to keep working hard for their companies. Also, in order to maintain their current satisfied jobs, employees will perform well and work effectively, which is beneficial for the company. Therefore, in order to increase the employees level of commitment, the manager can try to increase their employees level of job satisfaction. Recommendations For Managers: The results obtained from our study shows that there is a positive relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment (see Figure 13 in Appendix IV). For an organization to be successful, its managers must ensure that their employees have a high level of job satisfaction in order to mutually have a high level of organizational commitment. As mentioned earlier, the employees of the Downtown Hotel tend to feel fairly

satisfied with their current job. However, the lower positioned employees tend to have a lower satisfaction than those with a higher status. To address this problem, managers should focus on increasing the employees job satisfaction in factors such as: the work itself, benefit programs, rewards, work conditions, and promotions. These can influence the way a person would feel and perceive about their jobs. Indeed, managers may also apply job rotation so each employee will have an opportunity to perform different tasks using various skills and talents. By using this method, it may be able to further increase the interests the employees would have in their job. Furthermore, as shown in Figures 2, 3, and 4 of Appendix IV, there are about 73% employees within the age range of twenty-one to forty, more than one-third of the employees do not have a high English skill, and 20% of employees education is at the high school level. Therefore, offering courses and trainings to these groups of employees would be able to enhance their skills, benefiting both the organization and employees themselves. Managers might also decide to make use of a rewarding system to recognize those employees who perform their job well. Indeed, one would feel highly satisfied when he or she obtains a reward for their hard work and outstanding performance. Rewards can be of different forms, such as: a higher wage, improvement of the work environment (a safer and better facilities for the workers), and assignment of suitable and challenging works to individuals as according their abilities and personalities. Moreover, managers should motivate employees to be more helpful, considerate, friendly and good-natured to their co-workers and supervisors, because this would increase the employees job satisfaction and may motivate the urge to help out other co-workers.7 Indeed, providing sufficient opportunity for promotion to employees would significantly

Gary Johns, Alan M.Saks, Understanding and Managing Life at Work Organizational Behaviour (Toronto: Addison Wesley Longman, 2001), p. 117

increase job satisfaction because promotions reflect valued signals about a persons selfworth.8 Recommendations for Employees: As a recommendation for the employees working at the Downtown Hotel, it would be best for them to understand what it is that would make them more satisfied with their job. Not only would it serve as an advantage for the organization, but also for the employees themselves. By doing so, it would help encourage them to develop a happier view towards life. The employees should try to determine how satisfaction can be maximized and decide on who can help him or her to achieve these goals. Then the employee should discuss the concerns they have in their job with their immediate superiors, and try to negotiate ways to benefit and satisfy both parties. Indeed, the employees should try to keep an open mind to experience and to their work, so they can also maintain a happy attitude towards life. Employees may also have a desire to pursue with a higher education or to improve their performance, so that they can accomplish more tasks within the same period of time. By increasing their inputs, employees may get higher outputs such as better pay and benefits. By doing so, it may lead to a higher level of satisfaction. However, factors like the lack of financial resources may prevent the employee from the opportunity of taking additional courses to upgrade themselves. In addition, other factors like problems from outside of work may affect an employees job satisfaction. Therefore, employees may wish to discuss and express their concerns with their immediate superiors. Bringing the problems that employees have to the managers attention will indeed be benefiting for the employee as they can work together to make any special arrangements in mutual agreement. When employees interact with their superiors, the manager will be able to determine the employees level of job satisfaction and in turn determine the employees level of commitment.
8

Ibid, p. 117

In addition, employees may try to increase their intrinsic motivation, which is selfapplied. If employees set goals for themselves, and these are achieved, the employees will be able to feel a sense of accomplishment. This may in turn lead to an increase in the level of satisfaction at their job and thus affect their level of organizational commitment.

APPENDIX I Job Satisfaction Questionnaire: 1. I feel fairly satisfied with my present job. 2. Most days I am enthusiastic about my work. 3. Each day of work seems like it will never end. 4. I find real enjoyment in my work. 5. I consider my job rather unpleasant. Organizational Commitment Questionnaire: 1. I am willing to put in a great deal of effort beyond that normally expected in order to help this organization be successful. 2. I would accept almost any type of job assignment in order to keep working for this organization. 3. I find that my values and the organization's values are very similar. 4. I am proud to tell others I am part of this organization. 5. I could just as well be working for a different organization as long as the type of work was similar. 6. It would take very little change in my present circumstances to cause me to leave this organization. 7. I am extremely glad that I chose this organization to work for over others I was considering at the time I joined. 8. There's not much to be gained by sticking with this organization indefinitely. 9. Often, I find it difficult to agree with this organization's policies on important matters relating to its employees. 10. I really care about the fate of this organization.

APPENDIX II Limitations: 1. Sleep Well is a hotel chain with more than 4,000 hotels over the world. However, for our research, we only surveyed thirty-two employees the Seattle chain. The size of the sample limits the generalization of our research. In fact, thirty-two persons cannot predict the relationship between job satisfaction and job commitment of all employees accurately. 2. Based on the information provided by our contract person, a large proportion of lower position employees do not speak English. As a result, it is difficult for those workers to understand all the questions and fill in what they really feel about their jobs. It is possible that some employees may fill in the questions ambiguously if they dont really understand what the questions ask, which will affect the results of this survey. 3. The questionnaires were not created in a consistent form. For most of the questions, the lower score shows employees have less commitment or satisfaction. However, a few questions have the opposite direction. For example, in question three of job satisfaction (each day of work seems like it will never end), the lower score means that employees have more commitment or satisfaction. Therefore, when people do this survey, they may get confused. If they dont realize this inconsistency, they may answer in the opposite direction, which will also affect the total scores. 4. Our contact person is the general manager of this hotel. All the survey will be collected by him first and then send to our group. In some cases, this survey is not absolutely confidential. The employees boss, through the demographic information the workers provided, can identify some of the participants. If the employees do not

want their manager to know what they really feel about their jobs, they might provide moderate answers instead of true feelings. As a result, this problem will affect the result again. 5. In this project, we are only concerned with overall commitment. However, there are three types of commitments in the real world. Therefore, the positive correlation between job satisfaction and job commitment would not be directly applicable for the all employees in Sleep Well Downtown Hotel. For example, if an individual has financial problems, even though the employee may have a low level of job satisfaction, he or she may still have a high level of commitment to the company in order to maintain his or her salary. On the other hand, if an employees job

satisfaction is high, but his or her family requires him or her to work closer to home in order to take care of the children, this person may change to another company which has a better location. As a result, there are limitations for our research if it is applied to the specific type of commitment.

APPENDIX III Information from the Interview with the Contact Person: 1. I've been around hotels all my life because my father is in the hotel industry. So, as growing up I always worked in hotels in some type of gratuity position. Even during high school and college I worked in hotels as a valet, bellman or doorman. Once graduating college, I interviewed with a gentleman, who is currently my employer, about employment opportunities in the Seattle area. He said he had an opportunity for me as a management trainee at his hotel in Lynnwood Washington. 2. Sleep Well Landmark Inn - Lynnwood Washington: My first day of employment at this property was 11/1/95. I started out as a management trainee where I basically worked in every department of the hotel learning as much as possible about each one. In going through all the different departments of the hotel, I was able to learn how each department operated, how each department communicated/worked together, and basically how important it is for all departments to work in unison with one another to make for an efficient and productive hotel. I also learned another important lesson in working along side with the different people in each department and that is to learn first hand how difficult certain jobs are which gave me a better understanding as to what is a realistic production capacity of a specific job. Also, I was able to learn how to do pretty much everything in the hotel which is an important lesson to learn in management which is to be willing to do any job or task and for nothing to be below one to do. Basically, I never ask anyone to do something that I would not be willing to do myself. 3. Sleep Well Tulalip Inn - Marysville Washington: My second hotel experience started in 6/15/96 where I was promoted to Asst. Manager. This was a great learning experience for me in that this was a new acquisition in our group of hotels. So, this meant that I was involved in putting all of our policies/procedures in place, reorganizing the organization which meant shutting down the restaurant/lounge and terminating the staff in those departments, and a complete renovation of the property. This was a difficult undertaking due to the fact that this was my first take over which meant that I spent a lot of additional time doing work which probably could have been done easier but since I really didn't have the experience, it just took me longer to do it. I was eventually promoted to General Manager on 11/1/96 where I took on additional responsibilities which included contracts, leases, and accounting. 4. Sleep Well Harbor Plaza - Oak Harbor Washington: My third hotel experience started in 5/1/97. This was our third acquisition. Basically, I was the general manager of this property and was able to take all that I learned at the previous two hotels and implement that at this property. I actually was at this hotel for three years so I was able to actually see the fruits of all my efforts come together. My previous experience, I really wasn't there long enough to see everything really come together. So, in that respect, it was a nice change. This was a little bit bigger of a hotel than Marysville but very manageable.

6. Sleep Well Downtown Hotel - Seattle Washington: My fourth hotel experience started in 7/17/00. This has been the largest endeavor of mine yet. This is a 16 story boutique hotel. We took over this property with the intention to close all the food and beverage operations, do a complete renovation of all guest rooms, public spaces and meeting rooms, and to lease out our cafe and restaurant. This property was quite the undertaking in that we went from 110 staff to 55 overnight when we purchased this property. So, needless to say it was very difficult dealing with staff who resented us for doing that and trying to convert people over to the way we do things. I actually worked for 4 months straight without a day off working 12-16 hours per day. This was a handful. Basically, I worked this much so that we could get to where we wanted to go faster. The most valuable lesson learned at this property is the sense of urgency. Not to let things hand unfinished but to get things done as quickly as possible to get to the next task at hand. I guess I also learned how to oversee many different contractors and the scheduling of the renovation.

REFERENCES Altman, Morris. Worker Satisfaction and Economic Performance. Me. E. Sharpe, Inc. Armonk, New York, London, England. 2001. Sleep Well International, Inc. [Online] Available 2002. Booth, Patricia. Employee Absenteeism: Strategies for Promoting an Attendance-Oriented Corporate Culture. The Conference Board of Canada. 1993. Camp, Scott D. (1994). Assessing the Effects of Organizational Commitment and Job Satisfaction on Turnover: An Event History Approach. The Prison Journal, Federal Bureau of Prisons. http://members.aol.com/scapm6131/camp_tpj.htm Cook, Reichheld. The Quest For Loyalty: Creating Value through Partnership. Harvard College, U.S. 1996. Delaney, Bob. Alternative work arrangements: Do they make economic sense? [Online] http://www.hrpao.org/files/octoberfeature1.pdf. October 2002. Gray, Williams S. Liguori, Salvatore C. Hotel and Motel Management and Operations. Pearson Education, Inc, Upper Saddle River. 2003. Harpaz, Itzhak. Job Satisfaction: Theoretical Perspectives and a Longitudinal Analysis. University of Haifa. Libra Publishers, Inc. 1983. Johns, Gary and Saks, Alan M. Organizational Behaviour 5th Ed. Addison Wesley Longman, Toronto. 2001. Working for America Institute. US Hotels and Their Workers: Room for Improvement. [Online] Available http://www.workingforamerica.org/hotel/HotelReport/HighJobTurnover.htm. 2003 Job Satisfaction and Commitment of 44 Agents, Journal of Extension, Volume 32, No. 1. (1994). The Pennsylvania State University Department of Agricultural and Extension Education. http://www.joe.org/joe/1994june/rb2.html