A Conceptual Model of Predicting the Effects of Motivational Factors on the Students’ Career Decisions to join Hospitality Industry in China

Abstract

The increase world tourism is generating numerous employment opportunities in the hospitality industry in China. However, the top challenge lies in the attraction and retention of skilled and qualified employees to join this industry and the mainland China has encountered with a serious mismatch between supply and demand for personnel. Due to the problem of a great proportion of Chinese Hospitality and Tourism Management (HTM) programme students are not making their career decisions to work for this industry after graduation. Therefore it is important and purposive for this paper to provide a value conceptual model that predicting the effects of three motivational factors: intrinsic, extrinsic and parental factors on HTM students' career decisions to enter the hospitality industry. Moreover, this study also examined the internship programme as moderating effects on such relationship which is filling the literature gap of hospitality management research.