Abstract:
Employees are the pillars of an organization and the organization's success is majorly depend on the employees' quality. Hence, organizations in the world today are paying more attention to their workplace facilities and spend a huge amount of money on occupational health and safety. Although occupational health and safety aspects as a crucial factor in depicting work engagement, few researchers have been conducted quantitatively with establishing scale models to operationalize occupational health and safety in the hotel industry in Sri Lanka. Additionally, the researcher approach realized the impact of gender on the relationship with independent and dependent variables. The data were collected using questionnaires distributed to the operational level employees who work in three, four and five-star hotels in Western Province. The research sample consisted of 267 guests. Factor analysis and structured equation modeling were used for data analysis and hypothesis testing for this study. The researcher performed a descriptive analysis of the guest profile as the first step of this study and then investigated factors to identify factors that effectively identify occupational health and safety. Afterward, the researcher investigated the impact of occupational health and safety on work engagement. Finally, the researcher finds the impact of occupational health and safety on work engagement with the presences of the moderator (gender). The results obtained from the analysis illustrated that most important factor that impacts on occupational health and safety was the working environment. Results of hypothesis show that management-related factors, working environment related factors, and employee-related factors had a positive effect on work engagement. However, due to the moderating factor management-related factors and employee-related factors were insignificant and weakness of the path coefficient value alternative hypothesis of H4 (The management-related factors has a positive effect on work engagement with moderating role through gender) and H6 (The employee-related factors has a positive effect on work engagement with moderating role through gender) rejected while accepting the null hypothesis (Ho).
Keywords: Occupational health and safety, management-related factors, working environment-related factors, employee-related factors, work engagement.
