The Influences of Hotel Employee’s Capa-bility on Job Involvement, Workload, and Burnout

[[abstract]]In Chinese society, people are used to encourage workers by saying “a capable person are the busiest.” This saying describes a capable worker are often assigned more and more challenged tasks. Although capable workers can efficiently complete these complicated jobs as compared to normal workers, they probably devote so much attention to jobs that they have increased workload and may become a victim of burnout. Prior studies focused on the influences of worker’s ability on the perfor-mance that revealed the importance of capability. But those studies ignored the prob-lem of burnout for capable workers. Recently most of employees of the service indus-try in Taiwan experience burnout. Thus this issue should deserve attention because it has theoretical and practical implications that can link the literature gap. This study confines the research scope to the supervisors and employees of hotels in Taiwan. The objective of this study is to explore the influences of capability (measured by self-efficacy and perceived capability) on job involvement and workload, and the in-fluences of job involvement and workload on burnout. In doing so, we can examine the concept of “a capable person are the busiest” in the context of hotel. In order to precisely measure individual worker’s capability, this study invited managers of hotel to evaluate the perceived capability of their subordinates. Other re-search constructs were measured by using the subordinate self-administered ques-tionnaire. Finally we obtained 161 supervisor-subordinate pair of questionnaire in total. The results show that self-efficacy and perceived capability are significantly related. While self-efficacy has a positive impact on job involvement, perceived capability is positively related to workload. Surprisingly, job involvement helps reduce the level of mental burnout, whereas workload is insignificantly related to burnout. Accordingly, capable workers may have a higher level of workload, but they may not have burnout issue. Supervisors need to raise their subordinates’ job involvement by intensifying subordinates’ beliefs about their own capability. In doing so, the subordinates’ levels of mental burnout will be reduced. Capable workers are the importance human capital for organizations and are the critical source of the competitive advantage. The findings of this study can offer some managerial implications to hotel for managing human capital