Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Case of Malaysian hotel industry
H. Ismail, S.M. Radzi, N. Ahmad & S.K.A. Nordin
Faculty of Hotel and Tourism Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam, Malaysia
ABSTRACT: Malaysian Government has encourages majority industry players who contributing toward
national's Gross National Income (GNI) to have the cognizance of managing knowledge asset. Since the
business environment in Malaysia are highly competitive, all the industry players including hotel industry
must consider knowledge as a vital asset in implementing business strategy. It is expected that Knowledge
Management (KM) via the Knowledge Strategy (KS) implementation with the appropriate knowledge
strategic choices enable hotels to achieve sustainable competitive advantages. Therefore, this proposed
that the execution of KS will guide Malaysian hotel industry to manage the valuable asset of knowledge.
120 hotels located in Malaysia were agreed to participate in this study and the data were eligible to for
analysis process. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was conducted and result has confirmed that hotels
Malaysia have selected six appropriate knowledge strategic choices as to implement successful KS.
Keywords
:
Knowledge management, knowledge strategy, knowledge strategic choices
1 INTRODUCTION
2 RESEARCH ISSUE
Complex business environment requires business
firm to put variety of efforts in order to survive and
perform in a particular industry. However, due to
the factors such as global competition, technological
changes and sophistication of customer has make
business firm struggle to remain competitive in the
industry (Nordin, Radzi, Ismail & Ahmad, 2013).
Hence, business firm's has begun to explore on how
to attain sustainable competitive advantages (SCA)
thus able to achieve superior business performance.
In doing so, business firm must look into the
existence of resources in the organization. Accord-
ing to Hansen (2008), instead of looking to posi-
tion the product or service in the market, business
firm must look also into the buddle of assets which
can be the vital sources of competitive advantages.
This is where resource based view (RBV) play its
role in determining competitive advantages and
superior business performance.
Nevertheless, as strongly argued by Huang
(2012), the existence of resources in most of the
business firm are tangible which easy to be imi-
tated by the competitor. Besides that, not all tangi-
ble resources are in line with the contention made
by Barney (2001) which he argued that tangible
resource must be
valuable
,
rare
,
inimi
table, and
no
substitu
table in order to achieve SCA. This has led
business firm to search a new alternatives as to
remain competitive in the industry.
Today, Malaysia is the country that thrives to
become successful towards the year 2020. As a
result, Malaysian economic nowadays is seemed
to produce a good impact to the whole coun-
try. Reported in Key Economic Indicator (2012)
report, the Gross National Income (GNI) has
shown a positive outcome which in 2012, the GNI
was RM 237.1 with the increment of 5.7 percent
compared to the previous year. One of the impor-
tant industries that contribute to national's GNI is
service industry. Mentioned by Kim (2011), since
Malaysian government has focuses on industri-
alization, service industry growth as important
engine for Malaysian's economic.
Since then, hotel industry has received the posi-
tive effect resulting from the growth of service
industry (Khairil Wahidin, Nor Khomar, Radzi &
Azni Zarina, 2008). The average occupancy rate
from 2005 until 2012 were at a stable rate of 60 per-
cent (Tourism Malaysia, 2005, 2012a). Addition-
ally, Malaysian government has taken an initiative
to register more hotels to cope with demand from
tourist, which gradually increased yearly. Reported
in Tourism Malaysia (2012b) tourist arrival sta-
tistic, there are about six million increment of
number of tourist from 2007 until 2012. Based
on this increment, the number of hotel registered
recently is 2277 in 2012 from 1567 in 2007 (Minis-
try of Tourism Malaysia, 2007, 2012a).
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