Multiskilling of frontline managers in the five star hotel industry in Taiwan

Multiskilling in the context of a number of countries has been identified as significantly improving service quality, retention, job satisfaction, remuneration and promotion. The Taiwanese hotel industry suffers a labour skills deficiency and multiskilling the existing workforce is one way to address this, however, there is little research that explores this issue in the Taiwanese context. This exploratory research, a survey of a sample of five star hotels, finds that multiskilling training for frontline managers has been adopted by the majority of these hotels and three beneficial factors are positively correlated with multiskilling, with service quality as the most important. The other significant factors are retention and job satisfaction. Remuneration and promotion are found to have a non significant relationship with multiskilling. The findings suggest that multiskilling within a positive employment relationship, where remuneration and promotion are taken into account, especially in relation to the largely female workforce, could help hotels reduce high turnover rates of staff thus, establishing a stable and multiskilled workforce in the hotel industry in Taiwan. These observations have implications and consequences for human resource management (HRM) policies and practices in the Taiwanese context specifically, and more generally in the hotel industry.