STRESSORS IN THE TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY BEFORE AND DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC: A REVIEW OF LITERATURE

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.