Facial attractiveness and stereotypes of hotel guests: An experimental research

Facial attractiveness and stereotypes of hotel guests: An experimental research

Tourism Management 36 (2013) 57e65 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Tourism Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/t...

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Tourism Management 36 (2013) 57e65

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Tourism Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tourman

Facial attractiveness and stereotypes of hotel guests: An experimental research a, *   Zana Civre , Mladen Kne zevi c b,1, Petra Zabukovec Baruca a, 2, Dasa Fabjan a, 3 a b

University of Primorska, Faculty of Tourism Studies e Turistica, Obala 11a, 6320 Portoroz, Slovenia University of Zagreb, Faculty of Law, Study Centre for Social Work, Nazorova 51, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia

h i g h l i g h t s < Stereotypes affect social interaction between hotel employees and their guests. < In the experiment three most common perceived guests’ characteristics were examined. < Guests are stereotyped by hotel employees according to their facial attractiveness. < Facially more attractive are perceived as more demanding, kind and better consumers.

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 27 March 2012 Accepted 3 November 2012

The purpose of this research was to determine social interaction between hospitality employees and their guests, and consequently assess how front-line employees categorize and stereotype hotel guests based on their facial attractiveness with reference to three main characteristics. Social stereotypes represent a means of information transmission in the communication process and can enable a more rapid transfer of information during the service delivery in the hospitality industry. The experimental research was conducted with 113 hospitality employees at seven hospitality organizations on the Slovenian coast. The results showed a correlation between the perception of hotel guests’ facial attractiveness with their assumed characteristics that can lead to stereotyping. Hotel employees often link the guest’s facial attractiveness with three common perceived characteristics e guests’ propensity to spend, guests’ predisposition to being demanding and guests’ ‘kindness’, and tend to stereotype them on the same basis. These research findings contribute to a better understanding of the complex interactions that occur during a service encounter and show how facial attractiveness of guests plays an important role in the construction of stereotypes by the hospitality employees. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Service encounter Social interaction Facial attractiveness Stereotypes Experimental research Hospitality industry

1. Introduction Service encounter can be understood as an interaction in the process of communication between two participants e an employee and a guest, each acting out their specific role (Grandey & Brauburger, 2002). This is why the service encounter plays a crucial role in service marketing as well as in service differentiation, quality control, delivery systems, and customer satisfaction (Wu, 2007). There are numerous researches about the customer’s perspective and their perception (Bansal & Taylor, 1999) that show

* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ386 41 773 563; fax: þ386 5 617 7020.   Civre), E-mail addresses: [email protected] (Z. [email protected] (M. Kne zevi c), [email protected] (P. Zabukovec Baruca), dasa.fabjan@ turistica.si (D. Fabjan). 1 Tel.: þ385 1 489 5815. 2 Tel: þ386 41 822 311; fax: þ386 5 617 7020. 3 Tel: þ386 5 617 7042; fax: þ386 5 617 7020. 0261-5177/$ e see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2012.11.004

the importance of an employee’s attitude toward the guest in the field of quality. In social cognition, as the prevalent topic of contemporary experimental social psychology, many researchers try to understand sense making of perceivers’ social worlds (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2001). Relating to social cognition, Bruner (1957) argues, that categorization is an inevitable component of perception. McGarty (1999) defined categorization as “the process of understanding what something is by knowing what other things it is equivalent to, and what other things it is different from”. Crisp and Turner (2010) argue that people can also be categorized much like objects, events, concepts, attitudes and opinions. In fact, categories can be applied to all aspects of our lives ranging from purchases of basic items through entertainment venues such as, e.g. cafés or restaurants. This can also be valid with regards to the employeeeguest relationship in which both are perceivers from their own point of view, as Ule (2005) adds that one role of categorization is to simplify a person’s world perception. This makes it possible for a person to compose a fast impression of another

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person (Crisp & Turner, 2010; Sanderson, 2010) as impressions are based on only small pieces of information (Sanderson, 2010). According to social cognition theories, first impressions may be important in relation to the initiation and maintenance of social relations and have a great effect on a person’s attitude and behavior toward others (Kuzmanovic et al., 2012). Additionally, first impressions are formed on the basis of facial expressions, appearances, or particular actions as people tend to infer more about the personality, actions and their own expectations after forming their impressions. When people develop impressions of others, stereotypes are used as beliefs about personal traits (Biernat & Billings, 2001). To understand a world of complex stimuli people regularly develop and use categorical representations (e.g. stereotypes) when dealing with other people (Fiske, 1998; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Deaux and Lewis (1984) argue that stereotyping is an array of inferences about physical characteristics. Physical appearance is, along with perceived similarity, complementarity and reciprocity one of the four key determinants of interpersonal attraction (Crisp & Turner, 2010). Additionally, the physical appearance is the basis of physical attractiveness and the face is the main determinant (Patzer, 2006). Many physical attractiveness researchers study facial attractiveness (Berscheid & Reis, 1998); and the general consensus is that people do assign others a place in social categories by using physical facial features (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Facial characteristics play an important role in determining attractiveness and subsequently attributing behavior and personality characteristics (Deaux & Lewis, 1984). Several studies have shown that facial attractiveness can influence our social interactions and behavior (Adams, Ambady, Nakayama, & Shimojo, 2011) to the point of being one of the leading socialization factors from early childhood onward. Numerous studies have confirmed this, following the well-known person perception study of the “beautiful is good” stereotype by Dion et al. from 1972. This thesis was re-confirmed by Langlois, Ritter, Casey, and Sawin (1995), the leading authors and one of the pioneers of studying the impact of facial attractiveness on social interactions, determining that babies with more attractive faces receive more attention than babies with less attractive faces. Johnson (2005) discovered that newborns recognize a face and prefer it over objects or feature assemblies, despite the immature cortex and afferent pathways. This process results in our primary socialization and is rooted in an individual’s nature, which can also be applied to the employeeeguest relationship in the hospitality industry. In addition, McKercher (2008) establishes that stereotypes in tourism appear frequently and are more or less permanent. Accordingly, we recognized the need for researching employees’ perception of their guests.

employee and the guest can vary from a very positive to a very negative experience. To develop an understanding of the employee’s behavior in the service encounter it is therefore vital to understand the encounter itself and all perceptions and decisions made arising from that encounter as regards employees. At the moment of a guest’s appearance employees in service encounters automatically link the guest with specific categories and tend to act in ways congruent with behaviors associated with these categories e as Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) and Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998) claim, specific social categories can instigate automatic behavior by first activating a stereotypic trait that in turn spontaneously activates a behavioral representation. According to cognitive information regarding processing models categorization, Lord and Maher (1992) delineated automatic response models where perceivers look for patterns that correspond with their knowledge or experience instead of controlled and analytical processing of data. Since the time employees get to process information exhibited by the appearances of guests at first sight is extremely short, the characteristics of the information processing comply with those of cybernetic (or dynamic) informationprocessing models. This is applicable to general behavior and also social perceptions (Hastie & Park, 1986). Such models suggest that social perceptions are periodically reformed by updating previous perceptions with current information regarding behavior. During such updating, general impressions remain in the long-term memory, while specific behavioral information can be lost. The control theory models of behavior also reflect cybernetic information-processing (Carver & Scheier, 1982; Powers, 1973). In those models fast feedback alters learning, behavior and the nature of cognitive processes themselves (Lord & Maher, 1992) and those models are congruent with real-world situations as the evaluations of others are constantly revised in work settings (Hastie & Park, 1986). Willis and Todorov (2006) found in their study that personal attributes that are important for specific decisions are inferred from facial appearance and influence these decisions. From both the standard-intuition and the rational-actor points of view, trait inferences from facial appearance should not influence important deliberate decisions. However, to the extent that these inferences occur rapidly and effortlessly, their effects on decisions may be subtle and not subjectively recognized. Because the guests are able to perceive the attitude of the employee during the first interaction the employees must not stereotype their guests while managing expectations. The key to satisfying guests is to pay attention to the social interaction between guests and front-line employees, who should provide guests with unbiased service. Reflecting this view, the focus is on the social interaction in the context of service encounters through two key features: (1) employee’s perception in social encounters and (2) personal characteristics associated with stereotyping.

2. Literature overview 2.1. Social interaction in service encounters The service encounter is the main service provided by a hospitality organization (Pizam & Ellis, 1999) and it is based on social interaction. Turner (1988) defined social interaction as a situation wherein the behaviors of one person are consciously recognized and influence the behaviors of another person. Even more, social interaction is an elementary process which can initialize social behavior; it can be less or more complex from, for example, the exchange of looks to very complex verbal or non-verbal communication between two or more people (Ule, 2005). The key distinguishing characteristic of hospitality is also the employeeeguest relationship from which several dimensions emerge (Stringer, 1981). The reality is that the encounter between the front-line

2.1.1. Employees’ perception in service encounter Social perception is built on a social exchange during which communication on a non-verbal level is an integral component (Rus, 2000). Social interaction, which is also based on non-verbal information, is established with the guest entering the field of an employees’ perception, where the main position is that of the employee. Heider (1958) argues, that in social perception, social behavior is predicted by categorization. To simplify the stimulus world, people tend to categorize (Lennon & Davis, 2001) as categorization helps to explain and improve people’s perception (Wyer, 1988), is a time saver and shortens the cognitive processing (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Here stereotypes are deployed rapidly and give a lot of information about unknown persons (Gilbert & Hixon, 1991). Once a category is activated, all members are ascribed the same stereotypical traits

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(Wyer, 1988); Wegener, Clark, and Petty (2006) argue that the less information available the greater the impact of stereotypes. In fact, most human behavior studies based on first impressions, in effect, define categorizing strangers according to their appearance by using researcher-selected characteristics (category exemplars), that often represent personality traits (Cahoon & Edmonds, 1987; Cantor & Mischel, 1977; Lennon, 1986). The attributed characteristics are researcher-implied and may or may not be the actual impressions of the respondents (Lennon & Davis, 2001). A critical human skill is the ability to form impressions of others, as Asch (1946) summarizes: “This remarkable capacity we possess to understand something of the character of another person, to form a conception of him as a human being with particular characteristics forming a distinct individuality is a precondition of social life.” Many situations and personal variables have been found to have an effect on the formation of a first impression. Factors such as physical attractiveness (Cash, Gillen, & Burns, 1977) have been shown to impact the first impressions of an average observer. Based on face structures, people form both global impressions and specific trait impressions as well (Hassin & Trope, 2000). Hill, Lewicky, Czyzewska, and Schuller (1990) note that, even after only a brief exposure to a face, first impressions strongly influence the next social interactions, affecting hiring decisions, dating, and friendships. Doorne and Ateljevic (2005) suggested that employees always use conscious communication as well as unconscious signs and cues. During brief encounters employees are involved in an almost non-conscious processing of social information which is affected by physical attractiveness as one of the most important factors on a non-verbal level (Peracchio & Luna, 2006). In this context, several studies have indicated that a service worker’s physical appearance has had a significant and positive impact in cases of evaluation of the service worker (Gabbott & Hogg, 2000; Koernig & Page, 2002). This proves that the positively perceived physical appearance of a “stimulus person” positively affects the perceiver’s judgment of the stimulus person (Söderlund & Julander, 2009). Researchers have mostly studied the perception of tourists by examining different aspects of the perspective of a tourist (Wong Chak Keung, 2000), but there is lack of studies that investigate the front-line employees’ perception of guests based on their physical appearance. 2.1.2. Personal characteristics associated with stereotyping Social stereotypes are a special case of interpersonal perception; they are usually simple, overgeneralized and widely accepted (Karlins, Coffman, & Walters, 1969). Stereotypes tend to be negative attributions but they may also be positive and may help to guide brief encounters by injecting a degree of predictability into interactions with each person attempting to meet the expected needs of the other. Nonetheless, many social stereotypes describe highly visible and distinctive personal characteristics and are an ideal testing ground for the consideration of the cognitive and behavioral consequences of personal perception (Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977). Gjerald and Øgaard (2010) suggest that the hospitality business’ success is affected by employees’ assumptions. The structure and content of basic assumptions about guests therefore need to be investigated in connection with the influence of the perception of guests in the hospitality industry. In addition, Willis and Todorov (2006) point out the possibility that inferences about socially significant attributes are also rapidly obtained from facial appearance. Physical appearance cues have a great influence on assessments in relation to a variety of characteristics (Berscheid & Walster, 1974), particularly characteristics related to sociability and social competence (Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991). Brewer (1988) states that many recent empirical evidence shows the connection between social

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stereotypes and group memberships (e.g. age, gender, ethnicity, clothing) based on people’s physical appearance. Therefore perceivers often categorize them on the visual trait basis. Gjerald and Øgaard (2010) explored the hospitality employees’ assumptions about guests, co-workers and competitors. In their qualitative study using a group of hospitality employees they identified traits such as “demanding”, “attractive” and “profitable” among guests. The first characteristic is related to previous experiences that influence the formation of assumptions about guests’ demandingness. For the employee it is important what kind of requirements and expectations the guests have and whether they are going to be demanding in further communications. Sharpley and Forster (2003) discovered that in the opinion of employees the visitors of better hospitality venues (e.g. three, four and five star hotels) are becoming more demanding over time and that their expectations are thus higher. If the employees believe that guests’ demands are unreasonable, they will be less motivated in dealing with them. This could represent a potential risk due to the unmet expectations and dissatisfaction of guests, as Dmitrovic et al. (2009) state that satisfied tourists may positively affect service providers’ revenues and profits. Ledgerwood, Crotts, and Everett (1998) have discovered that a result of too often serving demanding guests can be the burnout of front-line hotel employees (e.g. emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a diminished sense of personal accomplishment). On the other hand, Brey and Lehto (2008) point out that guests who are increasingly demanding about quality and the amount of available hotel amenities drive the changes in hospitality venue service quality. In interviews with hotel management they discovered that families are more demanding and do expect constant changes. Additionally, Sharpley and Forster (2003) found that most front-line employees prefer working with a repeat guest. At the same time, because of direct human interaction (Wong Chak Keung, 2000), most guests expect to be treated better if they are familiar with the hotel employees since a repeat guest demands recognition and reciprocity. The second characteristic is the kindness of guests. In the course of interaction this characteristic also has an influence on interpersonal communication. Hospitality is defined as “kindness in welcoming strangers or guests” (Hanks, 1989) and “friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers” (Oxford English Dictionaries, 2012). However, when dealing with a kind guest it is easier for the employee to resolve potential complications that may occur because of misunderstandings that may be a consequence of overly high expectations. The search for positive interpersonal interactions is natural and a normal and expected reaction from employees. Bargh et al. (1996) conducted an experiment where participants more often interrupted the process when they were activated with traits, associated with rudeness. Participants, activated with the traits associated with politeness, less often interrupted the process of the experiment. This may indicate that the kindness of guests can also unconsciously lead to better treatment by the front-line employees. The third characteristic is the characterization of guests’ propensity to spend. People develop more negative stereotypes toward groups with lower socioeconomic status than toward those with a higher status (Gilmore & Harris, 2008). This can also be applicable in the sense of spending money. Money is closely tied to social status and guests are often stereotyped as being rich or poor. Lerner and Moore (1974) and Harrison and Saeed (1977) have determined that taller people are judged as more attractive mates and further studies indicated a positive relationship between the individual’s height and their personal income (Frieze, Olson, & Good, 1990; Melamed, 1994). Ayres (2001) has researched 200 car dealers’ perceptions of their customers as consumers. He discovered

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that black men and all women were charged more than white men regardless of their same age, level of education, standard of living and their average attractiveness. This seems clearly to be a consequence of stereotyping consumers based on their physical appearances. Based on continuing efforts by hotels to increase consumption per guest it is important to analyze the profiles of guests and their spending patterns. Many companies stratify their customers into different layers based on their spending habits. For instance, different groups of guests with different demographic characteristics and cultural backgrounds may display different characteristics in terms of their expenses and consumption in the hotel. That is why the hospitality industry often uses such systems as the Travel Support System that is based on stereotyping as a method for classifying guests into categories and then making predictions based on stereotypes associated with particular categories. In order to categorize tourists several authors have conducted studies which resulted in tourist profiles about their spending habits based on stereotypes. Gawinecki, Kruszyk, and Paprzycki (2005) researched the profiles according to age, working status, income, clothing, whether tourists like novelty, foreign cuisine, whether they go to restaurants that do not accept credit cards, etc. Kim, Prideaux, and Kim (2002) emphasized that Korean casino employees expect activities like giving a tip based on the culture of the guest and not the visiting country, so they studied the customers’ habits and found that the Japanese, the Koreans, the Chinese and minority customers leave a tip after finishing the game. They also found that Koreans and the Chinese customers leave a tip for the waitresses, while Western and minority customers do not. Based on stereotypes constructed upon their experience and memory (Biernat & Billings, 2001) employees have expectations about the likely attributes of their customers.

& Vaughn, 1991). Their further studies showed that people pay more attention to attractive babies than to less attractive ones and that they pay more attention to attractive adults, even adults they are familiar with (Langlois et al., 1995). People with a “baby-face” are less likely to be negatively assessed than individuals with mature faces (Zebrowitz & McDonald, 1991). Another aspect of facial attractiveness was examined in several studies regarding the hiring of applicants. Attractive people have a better chance to get hired (Dipboye, Arvey, & Terpstra, 1977) because they are perceived as smarter and more extroverted with better social skills (Dion et al., 1972; Miller, 1970). In the hospitality and leisure industries the impact of physical attractiveness is also apparent during interpersonal interactions between employees and guests (Elmer & Houran, 2008). It can lead to the likelihood that categorizing based on facial attractiveness may frequently influence people’s unconscious perception. There is a lot of literature about the connection between facial attractiveness and social interactions (Olson & Marshuetz, 2005) but little is known about it in the sense of the employees’ perception of a guest. The purpose of our study was to determine how hotel front-line employees categorize and consequently stereotype hotel guests based on their facial attractiveness. We restricted the study to three characteristics: guests’ propensity to spend, guests’ demandingness and guests kindness. Our general hypothesis was as follows: there is a connection between facial attractiveness of guests and most common stereotypes on hotel guests. In addition to the general hypothesis, we formulated three special hypothesis:

2.2. Facial attractiveness

H2. There is a positive correlation between the stereotype of hotel guests’ demandingness and their facial attractiveness;

People have been associating beauty with positive qualities since the cultural ascension of the Ancient Greeks (Eagly, 1987; Langlois et al., 2000). Dion, Berscheid, and Walster (1972) were the first to investigate the “beautiful is good” stereotype. Their findings indicated that there still exist stereotypes based on facial attractiveness since physically attractive people were perceived as people with desirable personalities and with a greater level of personal success in their lives in general. Overall, beauty itself has an impact on the evaluation of individuals in every manner (Eagly et al., 1991; Langlois et al., 2000). Schacht, Werheid, and Sommer (2008) argue that facial attractiveness expresses important socially effective information and is an essential social signal (O’Doherty, Winston, Perrett, Burt, & Dolan, 2003). Langlois et al. (2000) have summarized: »The effects of facial attractiveness are robust and pandemic [.] attractiveness is a significant advantage for both children and adults in almost every domain of judgment, treatment and behavior.« Some authors (e.g. Elmer & Houran, 2008) state that physical attractiveness has a huge impact on our everyday attitudes and behaviors and the impact is not fully acknowledged by the general public and marketers. There is a great impact of facial appearance on social outcomes. It is generally known that people with more attractive faces have several advantages over people with less attractive faces (Zebrowitz, 1990). For example, Aharon et al. (2001) have shown in their study that people pay more attention to attractive faces rather than to unattractive faces. Langlois and Roggman (1990) discovered that infants at the age of only 12 months more often approach more attractive female strangers than less attractive ones and have a more positive approach toward them (Langlois, Ritter, Roggman,

H1. There is a positive correlation between the stereotype of hotel guests’ propensity to spend and their facial attractiveness;

H3. There is a positive correlation between the stereotype of hotel guests’ kindness and their facial attractiveness. 3. Methodology The study was organized as an experimental study. It was conducted in 3 phases, starting in February 2011 and lasting until data analysis in September 2011. To find out what the most common stereotypes about hotel guests among professionals in Slovenian coast hotels are, a preliminary qualitative study was carried out. In-depth interviews were conducted in 6 different hospitality organizations. Altogether 11 members of the front-line hotel employees were interviewed. Interviewers asked the frontline employees what characteristics they usually notice when the guest enters their field of perception for the fist time. The interviews resulted in a list of 56 descriptions of hotel guests’ characteristics that served as a base for the stereotype construction. We applied an open coding technique (Flick, 1999). In the first step segmentation was done from raw material to short statements. In the second phase statements were categorized into areas of phenomenon, namely stereotypes of guests. In the third phase, the most common categories were extracted. In the fourth step we labeled the most frequently found categories. Finally, axial coding was conducted through which we determined the three most promising categories for further research that fit into our theoretical framework on stereotyping guests in the tourist industry. After a careful semantic analysis a list of the three most common characteristics was made: guests’ propensity to spend, guests’ demandingness and guests’ kindness.

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3.1. Instrument For the instrument construction a set of 60 photographs from the Istockphoto database (2011) was used. In order to ensure the reliability of the research results the instrument had to reflect the cultural context within which the research was conducted. Thus it was not possible to use photos from previous research; a new instrument had to be created via a relatively complex process. It was a set of ordinary people of average facial appearance. Since the majority of hotel guests in this area are Caucasian, there were no photos of people of other races. In order to design the final version of the instruments 275 students of the University of Primorska, Slovenia, were invited to participate as judges. They represented the average population of the University of Primorska in age and gender. Students who participated in the process of finalizing instruments and the sample of participants in our later study were very close in terms of education level. In the Slovenian educational system, completed high school is a necessary condition for studying at the university level. In our sample almost 80% (exactly 78.88%) were employees who completed high school education or even a higher level. Students were told that they were participating in a scientific experiment. Students were asked to rate every photograph according to a 7-point scale, from 1 (very unattractive) to 7 (very attractive). Photographs were projected on the wall and each photograph was shown to the students for 300 ms, as some researchers state that attractiveness can be perceived in 200 ms viewing time (Rayner, 1983) or even 100 ms (Locher, Unger, Sociedade, & Wahl, 1993). We wanted to achieve a so-called capacity-free process, often conceptualized as processing independence. That process operates independently of other ongoing processes, such as accuracy (Jung, Ruthruffa, Tyburb, Gaspelina, & Millera, 2012). This was very important with front-line hotel employees as they are accustomed to operate in a complex, multiple stimulus environments. Between exposures there was a 3 s break for the students to write down their evaluations into a testing protocol. The results enabled us to define an instrument in which there were no significant differences between elements, photographs rated extremely attractive or extremely unattractive were eliminated in the first step. After this we stratified the remaining photos in 3 age groups and 2 gender groups. The photographs arranged by age were grouped into strata of young, middle aged and seniors. Since data were distributed within the range for normal distribution, further elimination was made by calculating Crombach’s Alpha coefficient for internal structure according to the age and gender stratification. In the next phase Pearson’s correlation coefficients were calculated for the rest of the photographs and those that correlated with others at less than 0.30 were excluded. A final selection was made upon calculation of Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients that exceeded 0.90. This result was a good guarantee of an internally consistent instrument consisting of 29 photographs (see Appendix 1). There were 15 photographs of male faces and 14 photographs of female faces. There was one photo fewer in the group of young females, as an additional one would have compromised the internal consistency. A third of the persons in the photographs were younger, a second third were middle-aged and a third were seniors. The age structure of the people in the photographs was even. The testing protocol was adjusted to 5-point scale instead of 7-point as it appeared to be a much more appropriate scale due to the short time gap between the showing of each photograph. During different sets of photographs, the projection of bipolar adjectives at the ends of the 5-point scale was shown on the screen representing one of three most commonly used stereotypes of hotel guests. The first pair of adjectives was a bad or good consumer, the second was demanding or not demanding guest, and the third was

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unkind and kind guest, and, finally, front-line employees had to decide between an unattractive or an attractive face (see Appendix 2). The same 29 photographs were randomly rotated for every series of adjectives. In each series’ projection each photograph was visible for 300 ms with a 2 s break in order to enable the participant to rate every photograph and check it in the protocol. The instrument was applied in groups. 3.2. Participants The participants were 113 professionals from hotels in Portoro z, one of the Slovenia’s most popular touristic areas, who all agreed to participate voluntary. There were 45 male and 67 female participants, which generally reflects the gender structure in Slovenian hotels. There are no data about gender for one participant and type of work for three of them. The average age is 37.18 years. There are just slight differences in age between groups of employees in our sample; these are statistically significant between the management and restaurant groups and between the housekeeping and restaurant groups (Table 1). The distribution of participants according to the type of work is almost even with a moderate predominance of employees from the restaurant. Restaurant and reception employees have a secondary school education, housekeeping employees are mostly educated at a professional school level and the management staff at college and university level (Table 2). 4. Results and interpretation The main proposition of the study was that there is correlation between facial appearance of hotel guests and common stereotypes of guests. Pearson’s correlation coefficients were calculated for common stereotypes according to the facial appearance in general and separately for men and women. 4.1. Guests’ propensity to spend In relation to the stereotype of guests’ propensity to spend the overall Person’s correlation coefficient was 0.520, which shows the correspondence of the two variables when all employees were rating all guests. Employees rated the correlation for male guest at 0.492 and 0.347 for female guests. All the coefficients were statistically significant. With the male ratings the correlation coefficient for facial appearances and stereotypes for all guests was 0.538, separately 0.335 for women guests, and 0.470 for men guests. With the female ratings, the overall correlation coefficient was 0.506, for women guests 0.355 and for male guests 0.523 (Table 3). There were no significant differences found when analyzing age differences. Correlation coefficients between facial appearance and guests’ propensity to spend stereotype were statistically significant for all three age groups, and ranged from 0.24 up to 0.44. The significance was <0.05 in all three strata.

Table 1 Type of work and average age of employees. Type of work

No

%

Average age

St. dev.

Reception Restaurant Housekeeping Management Total

27 36 24 23 110

24.55 32.73 21.82 20.91 100.00

35.52 31.78 40.33 43.33 37.18

10.96 10.88 8.91 8.28 10.86

Source: Authors.

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62 Table 2 Level of education of employees. Level of education

Table 4 Correlations between facial appearance of hotel guests and their demandingness.

Reception Restaurant Housekeeping Management Total

Elementary 0 school Professional 1 school High school 16 College 5 University 5 Total 27

N

%

0

3

0

3

2.7

12

8

0

21

18.6

19 4 1 36

12 1 0 24

7 6 10 23

56 49.6 17 15 16 14.2 113 100

Source: Authors.

The results confirmed our first hypothesis that there is a positive correlation between the perceived facial attractiveness of hotel guests and the stereotype regarding their propensity to spend.

Guests’ demandingness

Male guest

Female guest

Total

Male employee Female employee Total

0.563** 0.240 0.383**

0.548** 0.030 0.225*

0.653** 0.162 0.380**

*Correlation is significant at the level 0.05 (2-tailed). **Correlation is significant at the level 0.01 (2-tailed). Source: Authors.

Table 5 Correlations between facial appearance of hotel guests and their kindness. Guests’ kindness

Male guest

Female guest

Total

Male employee Female employee Total

0.496** 0.646** 0.579**

0.398** 0.500** 0.465**

0.524** 0.666** 0.606**

*Correlation is significant at the level 0.05 (2-tailed). **Correlation is significant at the level 0.01 (2-tailed). Source: Authors.

4.2. Guests’ demandingness The overall Person’s coefficient showing the correlation between the guest’s facial attractiveness and their demandingness was 0.380; furthermore, when all employees were rating, the coefficient was 0.383 for male guests and only 0.225 for female guests. All coefficients were statistically significant. When only male employees were rating, the coefficient for all guests regardless of their gender was 0.653, however for male guests the coefficient was 0.563, and 0.548 for female guests. When only the female employees were rating, the overall coefficient was 0.162, the coefficient for men guests was 0.240 and the coefficient for women guests was 0.030 (all three coefficients were statistically insignificant) (Table 4). Based on these results our second special hypothesis was confirmed. Also, when analyzing age differences correlation coefficients between guests’ demandingness and their facial appearance ranged for all three age groups from 0.21 up to 0.32, with p < 0.05. 4.3. Guests’ kindness When evaluating the correspondence between guest’s facial appearance and employee’s perception of a guests’ kindness, the Pearson’s correlation coefficient for all employees rating all guests was 0.606, 0.579 for male guests and 0.465 for female guests. All coefficients were significant. When all guests were rated regardless of their gender by only female employees, the correlation coefficient reached the highest value of 0.666. On the other hand, when only male employees were rating, the coefficient was 0.524 (Table 5). Analyzing separate correlations for female and male guests, the male employees ratings resulted in coefficient values of 0.496 for male guests and 0.398 for female guests. Female ratings resulted in a much higher correlation. The coefficient had a value of 0.646 for male guests, while the coefficient for female guests was 0.500. All the coefficients were significant. When analyzing age differences, Table 3 Correlations between facial appearance of hotel guests and their propensity to spend. Guests’ propensity to spend

Male guest

Female guest

Total

Male employee Female employee Total

0.470** 0.523** 0.492**

0.335** 0.355** 0.347**

0.538** 0.506** 0.520**

*Correlation is significant at the level 0.05 (2-tailed). **Correlation is significant at the level 0.01 (2-tailed). Source: Authors.

correlation coefficients between the stereotype of guests’ kindness and their facial appearance ranged for all three age groups from 0.35 up to 0.45, with p < 0.05. Thus we can conclude that also our third special hypothesis was confirmed. 5. Discussion To understand the interaction between front-line employees and their guests during service encounters one has to consider how and why employees and guests engage in certain types of behavior with each other. It has already been proven that attributions based on stereotypes can influence the future behavior of people (Snyder et al., 1977). According to their roles in the process of interpersonal communication, stereotypes can help employees in the hospitality industry in fulfilling their professional functions. Even though everyone would expect or like that employees have an unbiased attitude toward guests, this study proved that this kind of stereotyping is almost impossible to avoid. The findings of this study are important for the management of hotel businesses that focus on implementation of an impeccable service in accordance with established standards, regardless of the impact of the guest’s appearance. Stereotypes should represent a challenge for effective spreading of the useful information within the hotel’s professional structure. Therefore a systematic training of hotel’s staff should be taken into consideration to help employees to identify the positive and negative effects of stereotypes on their services and in this way prevent misunderstandings resulting from negative stereotypes that might derive from the physical appearance of guests. The research conducted by Bizjak, Ben ci c, and Grabar (2008) in the hospitality industry of the Slovenian capital city showed that the employees are willing to take part in such training programs to gain new knowledge hereby improve their service, regardless of the formality of the level of education. Hotel management should consider these findings in creating guidelines for the proper treatment of guests to improve the service delivery. 6. Conclusion This study investigated whether and in what ways front-line employees stereotype their guests based on the facial attractiveness, taking into consideration three main characteristics. All our hypotheses were confirmed, showing that several important stereotypes are strongly connected to facial appearance, which in turn plays an important role in the stereotype constructions of the

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front-line employees. The strongest correlation resulted when analyzing guests’ kindness, where up to 40% of variance could be explained by the facial appearance of guests. Both gender groups of employees perceive guest’s kindness in accordance with their facial appearance to a very high degree. Compared to male employees the results showed that female employees tend to rate the kindness of all guests much more according to their facial appearance. When linking guests’ demandingness and their facial appearance, the results indicated that male employees perceive guests as much more demanding the higher they rate guests’ facial attractiveness, which however is not the case for female employees. The research results also showed that female employees tend to connect male facial attractiveness and consuming habits much more than male employees. We believe that the difference has a cultural cause. In our culture a man is more often perceived as “the one who pays the bills” but there are other possible explanations that are beyond the scope of this research. One of the limitations of the study relates to the fact that photographs were used instead of real people faces. Additionally, stereotypes are not formed in a simple way, or almost linearly as in our study: they are the result of a very complex process influenced by many factors. This reveals to be another limitation of our study. As McGarty, Vincent, and Spears (2002) state, most of the mentioned factors are of social, cultural or cognitive nature. Some factors represent biological, physiological, educational, and personal reasons, certainly cultural reasons, or reasons connected to a specific tourism activity e probably also the social position of employees in the social structure of the company, and so on. Thus, the results of this study cannot be understood as a direct correlation between facial attractiveness of guests and stereotypes held by the employees on this basis. This relation is only a small part of the complex process of creating operational stereotypes. The correlation, however, cannot be neglected since it amounts to about 30% of the variance and very much represents a common explanation. The common variance indicates a trend to create complex structures in which the stereotype of the guest’s attractiveness is only one element that is the subject of this research. A number of other formations of which some elements are outlined above should be the subject of further research in this area. Moreover, the study showed that hospitality employees perceive characteristics of guests such as guests’ propensity to spend, demandingness and kindness in correlation with their facial attractiveness. From this we can deduce that the mere presentation of a guest cannot be associated only with stereotyped personality traits but also with constructs such as satisfaction, evaluations, expectations, and other social behavior. A better understanding of the process and formation of stereotypes would clearly follow from future research examining the effects of facial attractiveness on such alternative variables. Acknowledgment  The authors would like to thank Cedomil Vojni c and Zoran Lapov from Hoteli Bernardin company and Nina Golob from Thalaso Krka Strunjan company for their kind approval to conduct the experiment with the hotels’ staff. We would like to express our thanks to Bostjan Bizjak for many helpful comments on this paper. We also owe our gratitude to all colleagues and students for their participation in defining the final version of the study instrument. Appendix A. Supplementary data Supplementary data related to this article can be found online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2012.11.004.

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  Zana Civre is a teaching assistant for marketing and human resources at the Faculty of Tourism Studies e Turistica at the University of Primorska. Currently she is a doctoral student at the University of Ljubljana at the Faculty of Economics, Department of Marketing. Her research primarily focuses on the field of consumer behavior in tourism.

Petra Zabukovec Baruca is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Tourism Studies e Turistica, University of Primorska. Her professional career in the company Hoteli Bernardin gave her experience in public relations, marketing communications, management quality and corporate communications. Her main research interests include quality in hospitality industry, communications, media and marketing.

Mladen Knezevic is a full professor. He graduated in social work at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and sociology at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. His present research interest is in the field of experimental researches in tourism.

Dasa Fabjan is a senior lecturer for statistics and methodology at the Faculty of Tourism Studies e Turistica at the University of Primorska. Her educational background is in the field of transport technology. Her areas of research include methodology with statistics, transport and tourism.