Six Sigma as a source of service delivery improvement methodology for the Malaysian hotel sector - Theory and Practice in Hospitality and Tourism Research - page 17

Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, as well as
the surrounding cities Putra Jaya and Selangor.
The region is also recognized as the most popular
choice for business, transitory and vacation tourists
with more than 10.7 million tourist visits or 41.2
percent of overall international tourists in Malay-
sia (Tourism Malaysia, 2012). There are approxi-
mately 40-50 four and five star hotels in this region.
Hence, the Klang Valley was seen to be the most
appropriate geographic area for this research. Four
and Five star international hotels were chosen as
the target population because these establishments
are recognized as having well defined manage-
ment systems, organizational structures and large,
well-staffed departments. The raw data underwent
three different types of analyses and these were: i)
principal component analysis (PCA), ii) reliability
and validity testing and iii) the Cronbach Alpha
value to assess consistency. Those methods had the
capacity to identify the most important questions
(or variables) of each dimension and to explain the
variation between variables. Four hundreds ques-
tionnaires were distributed to four and five star
hotels with 312 usable responses collected, which
represents a 78 percent response rate.

5 DESIGNATION

The analysis of data found that employees from the
front office department constituted 38.6 percent of
the total respondents, with front desk assistants or
receptionists constituting the highest percentage
of these respondents.
Respondents in the food and beverage department
represented a total of 40.1% of the sample and wait-
ers and waitresses from the coffee house represented
(9.9%), bartenders represented (4.5%), and banquet-
ing staff represented (9.3%) of these respondents.

Table 2. Respondents designation.

4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS

By conducting cross tabulations between depart-
ment and gender it was found that the front office
department represents 50.3 percent of respondents
and the food and beverage department represents
39.1 percent of the total respondents in the sam-
ple. In addition, there were respondents that rep-
resented departments directly related to the front
office or the food and beverage department. This
group of respondents constituted 10.6 percent of
the total respondents. Overall, it was found that
female respondents represented the highest percent-
age of respondents (60.9%) of the overall sample.
However, as the hotel industry workforce, in
this study in particular, is dominated by female
employees. The distribution of respondents by
department is presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Respondent distribution by departments.