Managers’ Perceptions of Age Diversity Within the Hospitality Industry

Master's thesis in International hospitality managementThis study outlines managers’ perception of age diversity within the hospitality industry. Ten personal semi-structured interviews have been conducted with managers in hotels in the region of Stavanger, and a latent content analysis inspired by Graneheim & Lundman (2004) has been conducted to analyze the data. Results show that in the different stages of employment, including recruitment, training, development and promotion, the informants overall perceived personal characteristics as more important than the employees’ age. These results are seemingly influenced by the human resource perspective (policies etc.) of the organization where the informants are employed. Further, the perceived characteristics of younger and older employees showed that these age groups are viewed in different manners by the managers in the industry. These perceptions were considered to be dominated by the informants own personal perceptions of others, rather than the human resource policies of the organization. Some elements of ageism and age discrimination were discovered in the managers’ perception of respectively younger and older employees. Results from the analysis shows that the informants are somewhat divided in their perception of whether the hospitality industry would be more diverse considering age in the future. Some state that this is unrealistic due to e.g. unfavorable working hours. Others state that due to e.g. better health and increased life expectancy, it is more appropriate for older employees now than it was before in the industry. Today, the older employees are an underrepresented age group in the industry. The majority of informants, however, desire a larger proportion of older employees in the workforce