Management practices, productivity and performance in the hotel industry.

The research reported in this thesis investigates the impact of the effective use of management practices on performance and productivity in the hotel industry, a low skilled, labour intensive service activity, with an especial attention been paid to Human Resources practices. This research was motivated by a need to understand how service sector activities are organised for high-performance, acknowledging its importance to the economy in terms of number of employees and contribution to the GDP. This research stands in the confluence of two distinctive but complementary research traditions: one arising from HRM and the other from productivity studies.