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Quality of Work Life of Thai Flight Attendant: A case study
Thamarat Jangisiriwattana
The Aviation Personnel Development Institute,
Kasem Bundit University
E-mail: thamarat.jan@kbu.ac.th
Abstract
The increased complexity of aviation environment poses several challenges to the
aviation organization in Thailand. The success of its organization depends on how it
attracts, recruits, motivates and retains its workforce. The human resource
management, HRM, profession needs to drive the policies, practices, and system that
influence employees’ behavior, attitudes, and performance. The quality of employee’
s work life is one issue with which HRM practitioners need to be concerned. Thus,
this qualitative study aims to describe factors that affect the quality of work life of
Thai flight attendant in Thailand by using a case study approach. The in-depth
interview has been conducted with 10 active flight attendants in one of the aviation
organization in Thailand. Data were analyzed by using the five steps process of
content analysis including familiarization and immersion, inducing themes, coding,
elaboration, and interpretation and checking to ensure data quality. This process
enhances rich description. The findings reveal six themes of the quality of work life of
Thai flight attendant, including compensation and benefits, work-life balance,
leadership, teamwork, job meaningfulness, and organizational culture. These findings
expand a greater understanding the quality of work life in an aviation context.
Nevertheless, it could be benefit for human resource management in aviation
organization in Thailand to pay more attention to their employees’ quality of work
life.
Keywords; Flight Attendant, Quality of Work-Life, Human Resource Management,
Aviation Organization, Thailand
Introduction
Human resource management practices in organization develop activities that
concerns employee who works and lives with. Its success depends on how it attracts,
recruits, motivates, and retains performed workforce. Employee perceived whether
his or her quality of work life is good on his or her expectation about the organization
(Yeo & Li, 2011). Therefore, this expectation is up to physical, security, affiliation,
esteem, and actualization needs provided by the organization. The physical needs
cover the area of workplace facilities, and the security needs cover compensation and
benefits, and the affiliation needs cover social-networking and collaboration
opportunities. The esteem needs cover autonomy and decision making, and the
actualization needs cover the strategic planning and development.
There are many empirical pieces of evidence, which have been revealed the
relationship between employee expectations and the organizational performance
(Kim, 2005). Employee expectations in the organization are what the employee feels,
perceive, or how they behave toward their job, team, and organization e.g. job
satisfaction, affective commitment, self-motivation, and organizational citizenship
behaviors. Recently, the employees' quality of work life, which was effected by what
they expect, was brought to the concern of many researchers. It was found that the
employees’ quality of work life enhanced the quality of organizational performance
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(Nayak & Sahoo, 2015; Shen, Benson, & Huang, 2014). It noted that the better
quality of work life of the employee helps to improve the organizational performance.
Statement and Significance of the Problem
In general, the longer an employee spends in the organization, the likelihood it
could lead to the higher income, better performance or greater career growth. This
study will expand more understanding the quality of work life of Thai flight attendant.
Furthermore, it helps human resource management practitioners in the aviation
organization to pay more attention to the areas concerned.
Research Problems and Questions
Since the identification of the measures of quality of work life is a difficult
task, this study uses a case study approach. It aims to find out what is / are the factor
(s) of the quality of work life of the flight attendant from their common agreement on
its concept of quality of work life. Therefore, the research question of this study is,
what is the quality of work life of Thai flight attendant?
Literature Review
Quality of Work Life
The concept of quality of work life was first introduced and discussed in an
international labor relation while United Auto workers and General Motors developed
this program (Gayathiri & Ramkrishnan, 2013). Till now, there has been no consensus
on its definitions. Typically, it is understood as the dynamic of organizational
physical, technological, social and psychological factors that affect individual’s way
of living in that organization (Aketch, Oder, Chepkuto & Okaka, 2012). Some
scholar views its as a positive attitude or bi-dimension construct, intrinsic and
extrinsic satisfaction (Aketch, Odera, Chepkuto & Okaka, 2012). However, the
different ways of definitions have brought different areas of concern. Examples are
safe and work health working condition (Adhikari & Gautam, 2010), job content
(Connell & Hannif, 2009), leadership and employee empowerment (Gayathiri &
Ramkrishnan, 2013), pay (Klatt, Murdick & Schuster, 1985), work social and
organizational equilibrium (Walton, 1980), and organizational culture (Yeo & Li,
2011).
Quality of work life of the employee has been led to many different outcomes
e.g., Muindi and K’Obonyo (2015) propose that it led to employee’s job satisfaction
and job performance. The study has proposed two moderating roles of employee’s
personality (based on Big five personality traits), and employee’s competence. Aketch
et al. (2012) revealed that quality of work life influenced individual contributes and
organizational performance. In the aviation business, many studies propose that the
quality of work life be related to the health conditions of the flight attendant including
physical and mental health. For example, in the study of Herdis (2007), Knutsson
(2003) and Sharma (2004) revealed varieties of health issues concerned with flight
attendant quality of work life. There is a loss of short- term memory, sleep disruption,
loss of appetite and weaken decision-making, shift work and jet lag due to time zone
change. Another study of Lee (2008) who studied in female flight attendants from a
union membership lists, explained that long haul international flight would strongly
effect to lower back disorder. However, after controlling for physical load, it made
job insecurity increased the risk for lower back disorders. He also found that women
would take this job as a long term career more and more, so he suggested that health
concerns should declined unless, the high turnover rate would begin since the early
years of working.
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In different field of study, for instance, from the study of Mosadeghrad, Ferlie
and Rosenberg (2011), they also revealed the impact of occupational stress. An
inverse relationship was found between job stress and quality of work life among
hospital employees, in Isfahan hospitals, Iran. Job stress has a strong correlation with
employee quality of work life and turnover intention. Ono (1991) conducted the
survey for Japanese flight attendant and suspected that elevate fatigue complaint rates
were length of working hours, length of night shift duties and time differential
between Japan and destination. Due to the highly completion in airline business, the
number of long non-stop flight between Japan to U.S. East Coast and western
European have greatly increased together with heavier passenger loads. However, the
increasing number of passenger did not correspond in the number of flight attendant.
It is required for an optimal balance of working hours, rest time and duty process to
maintain good health conditions and prevent fatigue symptom.
From the existing literature, employee quality of work life has been linked to
many organizational outcomes including job satisfaction, job performance, and
organizational performance (Muindi & K’Obonyo, 2015). There are also many
antecedent factors lead to the quality of work life e.g., health problem, working
environment, income and compensation (Muindi & K’Obonyo, 2015). However, its
definition and dimension are still an ambiguity. Thus, it is necessary to describe the
quality of work life in the aviation context.
Methods
This qualitative study has been conducted using a case study approach. Data
were collected from a sample of current active flight attendant in one of the aviation
organization in Thailand. They were asked to participate this study and ten agreed to
take part in interviews. This group of flight attendant was therefore selected as they
represent a specific cadre of flight attendant. Table 1 describes the information of the
participants.
Table 1: Description of the Participants
No.
Position
Gender
Age
Experiences
(years)
1
Air purser
Male
50
28
2
Air purser
Male
49
27
3
Senior Flight Attendant
Female
47
25
4
Senior Flight Attendant
Male
48
24
5
Senior Flight Attendant
Male
50
24
6
Flight Attendant
Female
35
13
7
Flight Attendant
Female
30
8
8
Flight Attendant
Male
32
8
9
Flight Attendant
Male
32
8
10
Flight Attendant
Female
25
3
Data collection
Triangulation of methods was used by conducting face-to-face interviews,
contextualized data on the direct experiences of those who are in the organization, and
by reviewing secondary literature. Open-ended questionnaire was constructed as main
data collection method. All respondents were interviewed which lasted between 45
and 60 minutes, and both recorded and shorthand notes were also taken by the
interviewer. All interviews were undertaken in Thai. At the end of each interview, the
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interviewer checked back over their notes with the interviewee in order to verify what
had been recorded and checked for any misunderstanding.
Data analysis
All ten tape-recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim. Data were
analyzed by using the five steps process of content analysis (Terre Blanche, Durrheim
& Painter, 2006), including familiarization and immersion, inducing themes, coding,
elaboration, and interpretation and checking to ensure data quality. They noted that
this process enhances rich description.
Findings
Content analysis of the 10 interviews resulted in 28 themes of quality of life of
Thai flight attendants, which could be analyzed. Analyzing data with regard to the
research question rendered the following six categories of quality of work life of Thai
flight attendant, which could be distilled through content analysis.
Compensation and benefits. Most of the interviewees have mentioned about
their per-diem (pocket money they earn when lay over abroad). They said the amount
of per-diem has not been adjusted for more than 20 years, in which contrasts with the
leaving cost of today’s economic. However, some of them recommended that they
must plan to spend their life based on their salary, which has not been increased for
some time.
Work-life balance. This matter could directly impact to jet lag problems and
resulting in loss of working efficacy and disruption of routine activity, most notably
sleeping habits. When their biological clock turns against the environment and
behaviors, insomnia and loss of appetite are found mostly in the frequent flyer. They
have to be very careful when turning back to Bangkok as their based from long flight.
Some of the interviewees said they avoided flying long-haul flight in order to avoid
this problem when got back to home based. This condition is even more difficult for
those who have families and children to look after.
Leadership. Quality of work life is characterized by opportunities for learning,
especially, from the mistakes employee makes. Therefore, the influence of leadership
in the organization could help the quality employee to cope with their daily challenge
at work. The aircraft is considered as ‘an office’ or workplace of the cabin crew,
which they need to spend many hours inside. An Air Purser who is a flight leader is
one of the key roles on an aircraft. His or her characteristic or style of management
influences his / her followers because they have to work in close collaboration with
each other until the flight was completed. For example, some of the interviewees
described that they liked to work with nice Air purser who did not blame them when
things went wrong.
Teamwork. It is a key determinant to enhance the quality of work life. It is
determined by the opportunity to capitalize on the collaboration that meets
organizational demands. Teamwork is about shared expectations, complementary
member competence, and work social and organizational equilibrium. Especially,
currently, when a company implements new service procedure, in which needs
everyone to work closer to each other. It requires more collaboration and
communication. Teamwork skill is necessary for team member.
Job meaningfulness. Quality of work life is fundamentally connected with the
job itself that flight attendant perform. Flight attendants want to be recognized for
their professionalism. The clearer they perceive the job meaningfulness, the level of
quality as associated with work life. Most of the participants have dreamed of being
flight attendant since they were students. They were proud of their job. This job
means a lot to them. They are happy to assist their customers in term of safety,
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security, and services. They were proud that they arrived at the destination safely,
and, sometimes, they could help passenger who were in trouble with health problems
during a flight.
Performance. Flight attendant’s understanding of their performance as
determined by clarity in goal setting and appreciation of their competence has led to
good responses. However, the performance appraisal process brings an upset issue to
some of the participants, for example, they cannot discuss or argue with their superior
on a particular topic for which they were appraised. They commented that it would be
better if the performance manager could give the feedback the results one by one and
promptly.
Organizational culture. Since this aviation organization has been founded for
nearly 50 years, it composes of different generations of the employees. For example,
seniority is a grave concerned for all employees. Working with various generations
can sometime create conflict among them. Some of the participant felt frustrated at
having to follow their superior’ s commands. Some of them felt warm to work with
those. Currently, company has a ‘report’ policy, which means that any employee can
make a report about any misconduct occurring in the workplace, but this is not an
appropriate in term of action between junior and senior flight attendant.
Discussion and Implication to Practice
From the findings, there are six factors concerned with the quality of work
life. Most importantly, all participants have declared compensation and benefits.
Therefore, this factor will be brought to attention in this study. In the field of human
resource management, compensation and benefits are a powerful tool for furthering
the organization’s strategic goals (Noe et. al., 2012). It is not because of the amount of
pay but is concerned with the fairness of pay. Equity theory suggests that people
evaluate the fairness of their situation by comparing them with their contribution,
efforts, situation they live with or those of other people (Trevor & Wazetor, 2006). In
this case, organization may need to re-consider the appropriate reward and
recognition program. It can positively affect motivation, performance and interest
within an organization (Milne, 007). An organization may invest in improve its
program. However, this win-win strategy may be improving quality of work life and
also benefits the company by improving organizational performance (Lau & May,
1998).
Presently, the human resource management (HRM) profession and practices
have improved their practices to response to the need of the employees. Their services
are not providing value but are mired down in managing trivial administrative tasks.
Most agrees on the need to successfully manage human resources for a company to
gain more competitive advantages (Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhart & Wright, 2012). HRM
needs to drive the policies, practices, and system that influence employees’ behavior,
attitudes, and performance based on the quality of work life of the employee.
Conclusions
Importantly, employee is the key resource in organization. Therefore, their
quality of work life relates to the organizational performance. Especially, in the
aviation context in Thailand, flight attendant’s quality of work life depends on six
main factors including 1) compensation and benefits, 2) work life balance, 3)
leadership, 4) teamwork, 5) job meaningfulness, and 6) organizational culture. These
findings could be benefit for HRM in aviation organization in Thailand to reconsider
its policy and practices in order to gain sustainable advantage in the competitive
market by improving the quality of work life of their employee.
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Limitation and Future research
There are several limitations of this study. First, this study relied on self-
reported data. Accuracy may be questionable as participants may be filtered
information before reporting it. Frey, Botan, and Kreps (2000) described that the
validity of self-report is flexible when participants “aren’t able/or willing to provide
complete and accurate information” (p. 96). Second, the researcher effect may have
introduced some bias. The researcher met some of the participants for the first time.
Lack of familiarity or interaction during the interview may have influenced the
perception or response of the researcher. Third, this study was set in particular
context. Therefore, generalization must be cautioned due to the demographics of the
participants.
Based on findings of this study, it is suggested a few direction for future
research. First, the findings of this study indicated six factors affecting the quality of
work life of Thai flight attendant who are working with one of Thai aviation
organization. The researcher also needs to further verify these factors with other Thai
aviation organization further too. Secondly, this study focused only on flight
attendant. However, there are many different professions in the aviation organization,
which need to be compared. Lastly, these findings would be triangulated with the
different nationality flight attendant in the same organization.
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