Analysis of Foodpath Restaurant in Australia

Questions: Identify a dependent variable for a business problem which is of interest and perform the following tasks. 1. Conduct a brief literature review which employs at least five articles which does the following: (a) Identifies how to most appropriately measure the dependent variable of interest, document and comment on its validity and reliability properties. (b) Identify at least two other variables (independent, mediating or moderating) which are hypothesized to influence or explain the dependent variable of interest, document and comment on their validity and reliability properties. 2. List the specific hypotheses relating the dependent variable to the other variables. Draw an accompanying diagram illustrating the conceptual model. Briefly outline the theory which underpins these hypotheses and the conceptual model. 3. Develop and justify an appropriate questionnaire which can be used to generate the data to test the proposed conceptual model. Explicitly consider other control and demographic variables which may impact on the employed framework. 4. Using the proposed quantitative method develop a research plan. The research plan should address, at least, the following, choices must be justified: What is the population of interest and what sampling frame will be used? How will sampling be conducted? What is the target sample size? How will the data be collected, mail survey, on-line distribution, face-to-face? Motivate your choice. How do you propose to analyse the data? What are the ethical implications of your research, and how will they be addressed? Answers: 1. Introduction Foodpath Hotel and Restaurant is a new organization in the Australian Hospitality Industry located in Sydney. The mission of the organization is to serve superior customer services and to offer different types of food to the customers based on their nationality and lifestyle. In Australia, the number of migrated students is soaring day by day. Therefore, the organization included different types of foods on their restaurant menu. However, until now the authority of Foodpath Hotel and Restaurant could not achieve as much success as they expected to have. According to the annual reports the performance of the organization is average including their customer services which is the main part of concern. The organization has severely failed to provide even satisfactory services to its customers and many complaints were submitted in the companys website and other customer review websites. Some of the customers also showed their disappointment by sending e-mails to the customer services depa rtment of the organization. Therefore, the major issue faced by the organization is its performance level, which is going down as a result of having employees who are motivated enough to perform their task. Therefore, the organization is trying to implement strategies such as employee reward system, employee training, employee safety procedures and a better organizational culture through a more effective human resource department in order to gain employee motivation. 2. Research Hypothesis: The research hypothesis will be formed in order to investigate the impact of organizational culture, employee training, reward system as well as workplace safety on the employee motivation via human resource management practices. The hypothesis for the current research work is mentioned below: Organizational culture is a major factor of human resource management in the context of maintaining employee motivation. Organizational culture is not a big concern of human resource management in the context of maintaining employee motivation. Employee Training plays a great role for maintaining employee motivation by human resource management. Employee Training plays a minor role for maintaining employee motivation by human resource management. Rewarding System is another effective tool of human resource management in respect to employee motivation. Rewarding System does not impact the maintenance of employee motivation by the human resource management. Employee motivation is greatly influenced by workplace safety ensured by human resource management. Employee motivation is least influenced by workplace safety ensured by human resource management. 3.0 Conceptual Framework Figure 2: Conceptual Framework 4.0 Literature Review 4.1 Employee Motivation Employee motivation is the most important factor for any organization. As mentioned by Lazaroiu (2015), motivated workforce means highly productive staff that will help to achieve organizational goals and objectives. According to Khan and Gautam (2014), a business organization must put motivation as a main objective in its organizational and business plan. 4.2 Employee motivation through reward system Employee motivation is something that allows a company to get maximum performance from its staffs. Foodpath, in order to improve motivation among its employees can implement extrinsic and intrinsic reward systems. These reward systems are also known as monetary and non-monetary reward systems. According to Shahzad (2013), when employees will find that their organization will offer them extra payments or some reward packages, so they will work hard for it. It will automatically increase the overall performance of the organization. However, Shield et al., (2015) stated that monetary systems are not the only solution that can improve employee motivation. He suggested focusing more on non-monetary reward systems. Non-monetary reward system such as long breaks, holiday gift vouchers, free health checkup, health insurances, pick and drop facilities and employee recognition forces an employee to think that the organization cares for them which motivates them to perform better. On the other hand, Mone and London (2014) stated that a mix of both monetary and non-monetary reward system will cultivate the best possible result. He mentioned the reward system implemented by Tesco that helped the organization to improve the performance of its employees. Tescos reward system is similar to Taylors theory that states that with financial motivational factors there must be some other factors which will motivate the employees in their personal and working lives (Cushman Burke 2014). Figure 1: Reward system of Tesco similar to Taylors theory 4.3 Employee motivation through training AS Mentioned by Conrad,Ghosh, and Isaacson (2015), training is one of the major source of employee motivation. Through trainings, employees feel more engaged and learns new skills that increase their motivation. On the other hand, Anthony and Weide (2015) argued that training systems are not only implemented to train and improve the working skills of the employees but also to create multiple benefits from its which include the benefits of employers. Training sessions that are closely monitored by the employers, help to find out strengths and weaknesses of the employees. Later based on those strengths and weaknesses further programs and job allocation are conducted. It saves money and ensures that right person is appointed for a job. However, it is true that training enhances long-term career development of the employees which increases their commitment towards the organization. In case of customer handling and providing a superior customer services training is necessary. According to Elnagaand Imran (2013), Costco, the largest warehouse chain in the world has selected Sales Training America to provide management training to their staffs. This training includes effective communication and evaluation which is currently the primary need for the employees of Foodpath. 4.4Employee motivation through employee safety In the restaurant industry the most common safety procedure is Zero-Injury goals. Zero injury goals were developed to guide the authorities of a restaurant or Hotel to build a system which will not allow any minor accidents in the organization. However, in past few years, this theory is declined severely. According to Griffin and Hu (2013), Zero-Injury does more harm than good as it injects fear and anxiety among the working staff rather than developing a positive, engaging atmosphere where works can gain valuable safety experience from close calls and mistakes. However, while defending Zero-Injury goals, Sageer Rafat and Agarwal (2012) argued that, it would be unethical to aim for anything but zero, especially when the concern is related to safety of the workers. He also mentioned that if an organization removes this method then it will carry a negative message to the workers that the authority only thinks about profit, not about the safety of the employees. In this scenario Young ( 2014) stated that if the workers are working under fear and anxiety it is impossible that they will be able to put their best into their jobs. Therefore, the best way to motivate employees is to leave the workplace on their hands. A small training session can be applied to teach the employees about the possible accidents then an organization must allow them to learn and adopt while working. 4.5Employee motivation through positive organizational culture Organizational culture means the atmosphere of the work place in which the employees are working. According to Awadh and Alyahya (2013), if organizational culture of a company is strong, employees can work without any problem. Besides, existence of a strong organizational culture is also beneficial as employees provide minimum resistance at the time of any change. The biggest example of organizational culture and its relation with employee motivation is Google Inc. In the year of 2007 Google was declared as the company that has best culture. According to Sarangi and Srivastava (2012), employee cannot work properly in an atmosphere where the tension is always high and the management always injects fear among the employees. In Google, the management follows a casual organizational culture where the employees are allowed to take volleyball breaks, 4 months of parental leaves, and free meals. 4.6Mediating role of Human Resource Management Human Resource Management, in any organization plays a major mediating role while implementing employee motivation. Each and every process of employee motivation is not only developed by Human Resource Management but also monitored and improved by them AwadhAlyahya (2013). The primary contribution of Human Resource Management is to recruit employees who are not only qualified for the job but also will agree to enhance the skills and abilities according to the goals and objectives of the organization. According to Shammot (2014), Human Resource Management is solely responsible for implementing proper reward systems in an organization. However, the main objective of the department is not implementing a reward system, but to implement a fair and transparent reward system. If a reward is not fair and transparent, rewards are given based on partiality then it will do more damage than harm (Jiang et al., 2012). Besides, it is also important to evaluate what rewards are the organization is giving to the employees. It is the responsibility of human resource management team to figure out whether the current rewards are gaining success to force the employees to work harder or not. If the rewards are not appealing to the employees, they will not feel motivated and will not perform beyond their limitations (Shields, 2015). Human Resource Management also plays major role in developing training system for the employees. The team of the department not only decides what training should the organization implement but also decides which employee will be fit for the training. Human Resource Management finds out the employees who are unable to perform as per the needs of the organization and put them into training sessions (Malik, Butt, Choi, 2015). By monitoring and evaluating the results of training, the human resource management department helps its higher authorities to decide which employee would be fit for a task. Workplace safety procedures along with organizational culture also depend on the activities of an organizations human resource management (Malik, Butt, Choi, 2015). The human resource team decides how an organizational environment will become amicable and safe for working. An active human resource department will figure out the unsafe areas of an organization and will provide proper precautionary instruments to reduce the amount of risk. Parental leaves, gaming facilities or any other activity that helps the employees to keep their minds fresh is also selected by the human resource team (Awadh Alyahya, 2013). Therefore, it can be said human resource management helps to implement activities such as employee reward system, employee training sessions, positive organizational culture and workplace safety that in turn increases the motivation among the employees. 5.0 Questionnaire Q1. What is your age? Q2. What is your gender? Q3. Since when are you working in Foodpath? Q4. Does employee training increases your loyalty towards Foddpath? Q5. What is the major outcome of employee training? Q6. What is the organizational culture is like in Foodpath? Q7. Does the organizational culture enhance your loyalty towards Foodpath? Q8. What do you think positive organizational culture helps with? Q9. Are you satisfied with the reward system of Foodpath? Q10. Does Reward system influence you to perform better? Q11. Does Reward system increase your loyalty towards foodpath? Q12. Is Foodpath concerned enough about workplace safety? Q13. Does workplace safety get you comfortable at the time of working? Q14. Does workplace safety influence you to perform better? 6.0 Sampling Method: In the traditional sense, sample refers to the fraction of the entire population which has been selected in order to collect their opinion on a certain topic. The ideal sample is supposed to reflect the exact perception of the entire targeted population through their response (Csikszentmihaly Larson, 2014). There are basically two kind of sampling techniques which are highly practiced in the research front. These sampling techniques are probability sampling technique and non-probability sampling technique. The probability sampling technique presents the selection process on the sole basis of random assortment. The probability sampling technique can be immensely useful to provide the population a fair chance in respect to being selected as the respondents. This way the data can be collected without any kind of human emotive influence (Csikszentmihaly Larson, 2014). The neutral nature of the data will help to ensure the appropriateness of the responses. On the other hand, the non-pro bability sampling technique uses a level of biasness for selecting the respondents which can affect the neutral nature of the obtained data. The research work is concerned of finding out the impact of human resource management practices on the employee motivation. Therefore, the scope of collecting the random data will provide considerable amount of relevance to the research outcome. Therefore, the probability sampling technique will be most appropriate in this case. 7.0 Data Analysis Data analysis is most important part of any kind of research work. There are various kinds of data analysis methods which are broadly practiced in the sector of research work. In the current context the data analysis will help to get an understanding of the exact impact of the employee training, organizational culture, work place safety as well as 5rewarding system formed by human resource system on the employee motivation. The responses of the employee collected by probability sampling technique can be evaluated by descriptive statistics which will ensure the proper visual of the findings (Volet Vauras2013). The descriptive statistics greatly relies on the disruption as well as central tendency of the data. The SPSS software will be most influential for analyzing the responses with relative ease and efficiently. Therefore, Descriptive statistics as well as SPSS software will be used in case of analyzing the data. 8.0 Ethical Consideration: The research work must be conducted on the basis of several ethical considerations. The ethical consideration will help the relevance as well as legal status of the entire research outcome. The current research work will ensure to develop most suitable work place environment where the research worker will treat each other with proper respect. In addition to that, the research worker will not be involved with the project without their consent. Moreover, the study will keep in mind to comply with the Data Protection Act 1998 which entails to prevent the breaching of the sensitive data (Manning, 2015). The research work will not receive any kind of fund from the third party source where the research outcome will be influenced. In addition, the data will not be collected from any kind of commercial website (Kaur Mehrotra2013). The survey will be performed with a professionals as well as compassionate attitude. Any kind of personal information will not be asked to the respondents. These ethical considerations will be most essential to perform the project with a better pathway. References Anthony, P. J., Weide, J. (2015). Motivation and career-development training programs: Use of regulatory focus to determine program effectiveness.Higher Learning Research Communications,5(2), 24. Awadh, A. M., Alyahya, M. S. (2013). Impact of Organizational Culture on Employee Performance.International Review of Management and Business Research,2(1), 168. Conrad, D., Ghosh, A., Isaacson, M. (2015). 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