Abstract:
The objective of this article was to compare stressors in hospitality and
tourism industries prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Articles
were gathered from the World of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and
Mendeley using specific keywords, namely “stressors”, “tourism and
hospitality”, “employee” for the purpose of synthesizing existing research
on stressors affecting hospitality and tourism employees from the year
2000 until 2022. A total of 45 articles were found that matched the criteria.
According to the systematic review of literature, stressors among
hospitality and tourism employees prior to COVID-19 can be divided into
two broad categories namely, occupational stress and emotional stress,
while after the pandemic emerged with another category of stress themed
induced stress. Accordingly, occupational stress consists of workload, task
characteristics, work-life balance, unrealistic objectives, competition in
career development, role ambiguity, and management and/or customer
behaviour. The emotional stress, on the other hand, consists of emotional
exhaustion, lack of empathy, lack of support, inadequate feedback and being
undervalued. Finally, stressors during COVID-19 include perceived health
risk, psychological safety, threat and risk of contagion, stigma and social
exclusion, job insecurity, and slashing of financial benefits. The results of
this study enable industry and stakeholders to strategize efforts to reduce
stressors in the workplace and improve employees’ levels of stressors and
eventually result in tourist satisfaction.
