505355
research-article2013
CQXXXX10.1177/1938965513505355Cornell Hospitality QuarterlyTews et al.
Human Resources Management
Does Fun Pay? The Impact of Workplace
Fun on Employee Turnover and
Performance
Cornell Hospitality Quarterly
54(4) 370–382
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1938965513505355
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Michael J. Tews1, John W. Michel2, and Kathryn Stafford3
Abstract
This research demonstrated that fun in the workplace has both beneficial and potentially negative effects on employees in
the hospitality industry. This research focused on the impact of fun activities and manager support for fun on employee
performance and turnover. Fun activities include such endeavors as productivity contests, social events, teambuilding
activities, and public celebrations of work achievements and personal milestones. In turn, manager support for fun reflects
whether managers in general allow and encourage employees to have fun on the job. With a sample of 195 servers from a
national restaurant chain, we found that fun activities had a favorable impact on performance and manager support for fun
had a favorable impact in reducing turnover. Interestingly, manager support for fun had an adverse impact on performance.
Thus, whether fun ultimately is beneficial depends on the type of fun and the desired human resource outcome.
Keywords
workplace fun; turnover; retention; performance; affective commitment
It has long been argued that fun matters in the workplace.
The roots of the modern workplace fun movement can be
found in the work of Peters and Waterman (1982) and Deal
and Kennedy (1982), who encouraged managers to develop
organizational cultures that promote play, humor, and fun.
More recently, fun has been advocated in the popular press
to promote energized and productive work environments
(Lundin, Paul, and Christensen 2000). In fact, a number of
organizations, such as Pike Place Fish Market, Google,
IBM, and Southwest Airlines, have incorporated fun into
their organizational cultures with great reported success
(Collinson 2002; Karl et al. 2005; Sunoo 1995). Proponents
of fun suggest a host of favorable outcomes, such as higher
employee job satisfaction, morale, creativity, performance,
and retention, as well as reduced employee tardiness, absenteeism, and burnout (Abner 1997; Abramis 1989; Lundin,
Paul, and Christensen 2000). Despite the anecdotal evidence of the benefits of fun, academic research has only
begun to test the value of fun within the last decade.
The central premise of this article is that fun may be of
strategic importance for employee retention and productivity in the hospitality industry. In one respect, fun may promote camaraderie and the development of cohesive working
relationships among employees. Moreover, fun may motivate employees to work to their potential by making the
work more enjoyable, reducing stress, and directing
employees toward accomplishing their performance goals.
Supporting the assertion that fun is valued in the hospitality
industry, Dermody (2002) reported that fun was one of the
top reasons cited by restaurant managers as to why their
employees remained with their establishments. We believe
that hospitality employees certainly do appreciate a work
environment that includes fun, but we need to further examine the actual business impact of fun in the workplace.
Toward this end, the goal of this research is to test the popular belief that fun matters in the hospitality industry in terms
of employee retention and performance. In that context, we
focus on the impact of two types of fun—fun activities and
manager support for fun—on turnover and performance
among servers at a national restaurant chain.
What’s Fun Got to Do with It?
As we said, academic research has only recently begun to
focus on the business value of fun. These studies have
focused on various aspects of workplace fun and its
1
Penn State University, University Park, PA, USA
Loyola University of , Baltimore, MD, USA
3
Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
2
Corresponding Author:
Michael J. Tews, Penn State University, School of Hospitality
Management, 121 Mateer Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
Email: mjt17@psu.edu
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Tews et al.
outcomes, and they have included both quantitative and
qualitative investigations. As a whole, these studies have
provided an initial step toward establishing impact of fun
in the workplace.
Karl and colleagues focused on the impact of experienced fun, which refers to whether individuals experience
the existence of fun on the job. Peluchette and Karl (2005),
for instance, established that experienced fun was positively
related to job satisfaction for healthcare employees.
Subsequently, Karl and Peluchette (2006a) found that experienced fun buffered the impact of emotional exhaustion on
job dissatisfaction among healthcare workers, and Karl,
Peluchette, and Harland (2007) demonstrated that experienced fun was positively related to job satisfaction and
negatively related to emotional exhaustion. Among students
employed in service settings, Karl and Peluchette (2006b)
found that experienced fun was positively related to job satisfaction and to employee perceptions of customer service
quality. Finally, Karl, Peluchette, and Hall (2008) demonstrated with volunteers that experienced fun was positively
related to job satisfaction and negatively related to turnover
intentions.
McDowell (2004) and Fluegge (2008) focused on the
impact of fun as a multidimensional, higher order construct.
McDowell developed a four-dimensional measure of fun,
used in both of these studies, which included socializing,
celebrating, personal freedoms, and global fun. Socializing
refers to friendly social interactions among coworkers; celebrating refers to marking special events and having social
gatherings at work; personal freedoms refers to employees
being afforded flexibility and autonomy regarding workplace attire, playing music, and playing around at work; and
global fun refers to an overall evaluation of whether an
organization has a fun work climate. With oil company
employees, McDowell demonstrated that fun was significantly related to job satisfaction, affective organizational
commitment, and turnover intentions. Extending
McDowell’s work, Fluegge found that fun has an impact on
job performance for working undergraduate students. That
study provided evidence that fun has a positive impact on
task performance, creative performance, and organizational
citizenship behavior. However, it should be noted that since
fun was examined as a single dimension, McDowell and
Fluegge did not assess which forms were more influential.
Tews, Michel, and Bartlett (2012) examined the impact
of three forms of fun in the context of applicant attraction.
They asked a sample of undergraduate job seekers to evaluate hypothetical recruiting scenarios that included three
forms of fun: fun activities, fun coworker interactions, and
fun job responsibilities. Their results demonstrated that
fun was a stronger predictor of applicant attraction
than compensation and opportunities for advancement.
Moreover, fun coworker interactions and fun job responsibilities were stronger predictors of applicant attraction
than fun activities.
Some qualitative investigations have viewed the impact
of fun in a more critical light. In one such piece, Redman
and Mathews (2002) reported on the implementation of a
“fun culture,” which called on managers to be enthusiastic
about employees having fun and saw the organization sponsor fun activities. While this program improved staff relations, reduced stress, and increased service quality, Redman
and Mathews found that some individuals viewed the program cynically. Similarly, Fleming (2005) found that many
employees disliked company-sponsored fun, considering it
inauthentic and fake. These studies suggest that not all
forms of fun are equal and that some forms of fun may be
more valued than others.
Despite what we currently know, additional research is
warranted in two key respects. One, research is needed that
further examines the impact of fun on key behavioral outcomes, such as employee turnover and performance, to substantiate the generalizability of previous findings. Two,
research is necessary that examines the impact of different
types of fun on these outcomes, given that not all types of
fun may be equal. While fun may have value in the workplace, additional work that examines fun in a more nuanced
perspective would be fruitful.
The Impact of Fun on Turnover and
Performance
Workplace fun is a multifaceted construct that refers to “any
social, interpersonal, or task activities at work of a playful
or humorous nature which provide an individual with
amusement, enjoyment, or pleasure” (Fluegge 2008, 15).
As illustrated in the studies reviewed earlier, fun can be
derived from various sources on the job. This research
focuses on two aspects of fun—fun activities and manager
support for fun. We focus on these two aspects of fun
because they are largely under management’s direct control,
and because management may have a fair amount of discretion in implementing such aspects of fun in the workplace.
Fun activities include such endeavors as productivity contests, social events, teambuilding activities, and public celebrations of work achievements and personal milestones.
Such activities have been a common focus of popularized
accounts of fun at work and several empirical investigations
(e.g., Ford, McLaughlin, and Newstrom 2003; Hemsath,
Yerkes, and McCullen 1997; Karl et al. 2005). Manager
support for fun, in turn, is conceptualized as the extent to
which managers allow and encourage employees to have
fun on the job. This type of support, which is similar to
McDowell’s (2004) personal freedoms construct, includes
adopting a relatively casual business attitude and affording
employees the opportunity to have fun at work.
Fun and employee turnover. Employee turnover is arguably
one of the hospitality industry’s greatest management challenges. Turnover rates for entry-level employees in hotels
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Cornell Hospitality Quarterly 54(4)
and restaurants can easily exceed 50 percent annually
(Hinkin and Tracey 2000; Tracey and Hinkin 2008; Wildes
2005), straining organizations with escalating costs and lost
productivity (Hinkin and Tracey 2000). Moreover, given
high turnover and the need to quickly fill vacancies, managers often fall victim to hiring warm bodies without concern
for qualifications, which only compromises the guest
experience.
Fun may be an antidote to the turnover challenge, since
most individuals want more from work than financial compensation. In addition to sufficient pay, employees seek
intrinsic satisfaction, quality relationships with others, and
enjoyment in their work (Grant and Parker 2009).
Furthermore, given the large amount of time spent on the
job, individuals would likely prefer the experience to be
enjoyable and fun. While too much fun may be a bad thing,
a healthy dose may enhance employees’ quality of work life.
In one respect, fun may be important in reducing turnover among hospitality employees because fun is arguably
one of the reasons why individuals seek employment in the
hospitality industry in the first place. The hospitality industry is typically thought of as a fun and social industry, and
individuals may want to work in hospitality because it is fun
and dynamic. New hires may soon find that not all hospitality work environments are particularly fun, however.
Whether employee needs and expectations are met with
respect to fun may determine ultimately whether employees
remain with their place of employment.
Fun is also thought to help reduce turnover because it
may compensate for conditions of employment that are not
generally favorable. Entry-level hospitality work is often
considered “low skill and low pay” and is typically not conducive to promoting long-term retention. Hinkin and Tracey
(2000) asserted that a number of outdated human resource
management (HRM) practices continue to plague the hospitality industry and contribute to the perennial turnover challenge. They contended that employees often perform routine
tasks, are given little autonomy in carrying out their work,
receive inadequate supervision, and are typically poorly
compensated for their efforts. Furthermore, work shifts are
frequently erratic and irregular (DiPietro and Milman
2004), and the work is often emotionally demanding
(Ashforth and Humphrey 1993). In spite of these negatives,
fun may create a more favorable work environment and
promote retention.
On another front, fun could curb turnover because it
may foster more cohesive interpersonal relationships.
Maertz and colleagues argued that high-quality relationships are key forces that embed employees in organizations
(Maertz and Campion 2004; Maertz and Griffeth 2004).
Similarly, Mossholder, Settoon, and Henagan (2005, 608)
asserted that high-quality interpersonal relationships
“enmesh individuals within a relational web, making them
less susceptible to forces that could dislodge them from
their organization.” In the hospitality industry, coworker
relationships may be especially important given the interactional nature of job responsibilities. We argue that fun
activities and manager support for fun allow employees to
interact with each other informally and facilitate individuals getting to know each other better, thereby providing a
context that facilitates the development of friendships.
Based on these interrelated arguments, it is hypothesized
that fun activities and manager support for fun will be significantly related to turnover.
Hypothesis 1a: Fun activities will be negatively related
to turnover.
Hypothesis 1b: Manager support for fun will be negatively related to turnover.
Fun and employee performance. Fun may also have a significant impact on employee performance for three reasons.
First, fun may represent a positive job resource, in line with
the job demands-resources model, which proposes that
greater job resources lead to fewer job demands and greater
employee well-being (Demerouti et al. 2001). Fun may be a
resource for hospitality employees because it fosters social
relationships that provide social support to combat the
stress of service work and enables individuals to immerse
themselves in their work and be more productive. Second,
fun may serve as an individual recovery mechanism and
therefore promote sustained effort (Sonnentag 2003). Fun
may allow employees to take momentary time off from
their tasks, recharge, and thus be more engaged when on
task. Finally, in the context of fun activities, fun could facilitate goal accomplishment, such as in the case of sales productivity contests. Such contests with special incentives are
widely popular among restaurant organizations to enhance
check averages and total sales revenue (Murphy, Dacin, and
Ford 2004). If properly designed, such activities likely have
a significant influence on the effort employees devote
toward achieving sales goals. Because fun may engage
employees in their work roles in a variety of ways, fun
activities and manager support for fun are hypothesized to
have a positive relationship with employee performance.
Hypothesis 2a: Fun activities will be positively related
to performance.
Hypothesis 2b: Manager support for fun will be positively related to performance.
Interaction between fun activities and manager support for
fun. An additional issue to be examined is whether fun
interacts with management support in influencing turnover
and performance. It may be the case that fun activities
would have the greatest impact when managers support fun.
Considering the resistance to fun activities in some instances
(Fleming 2005; Redman and Mathews 2002), we believe
that employees may be more resistant when activities are
incongruent with other aspects of work. However, when fun
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Tews et al.
activities and manager support for fun align, the overall
impact could be greater. This argument builds on strategic
HRM research findings that demonstrate that HRM practices are more effective when they are in alignment with one
another (Delery and Doty 1996). Given that manager support sets the stage for fun in the workplace, fun activities
should be more effective when they are congruent with this
support. When manager support for fun is low, employees
are thought to perceive such activities as artificial and contrived. However, when manager support for fun is high,
employees are thought to perceive these activities as more
genuine. In this case, fun activities would likely be more
effective in achieving favorable outcomes.
Hypothesis 3a: The impact of fun activities on turnover
will be stronger when there are greater levels of manager
support for fun.
Hypothesis 3b: The impact of fun activities on performance will be stronger when there are greater levels of
manager support for fun.
Younger versus older employees. The other issue we wanted
to investigate is whether fun has a different impact on
employees of different ages. A common perception is that
young individuals (particularly the “millennials,” born in
1980 and later) generally value fun more than their baby
boomer elders do. Researchers have suggested that millennials prefer work environments that emphasize freedom,
status, and social involvement, and they are quick to leave
their jobs if these needs are not met (Crumpacker and
Crumpacker 2007; Dries, Pepermans, and De Kerpel 2008;
Loughlin and Barling 2001; Smola and Sutton 2002). Given
the relative youth of most hospitality workers, fun may be
valued in the hospitality industry on the whole. That said,
there is still variability in age among entry-level employees,
and we hypothesize that the dimensions of fun will exhibit
stronger relationships with turnover and performance for
younger employees than older ones.
Hypothesis 4a: Fun activities and manager support for
fun will have a stronger negative impact on turnover for
younger versus older individuals.
Hypothesis 4b: Fun activities and manager support for
fun will have a stronger positive impact on performance
for younger versus older individuals.
Affective commitment. The final issue to be examined in this
research is the extent to which affective organizational commitment mediates the relationship of fun with turnover and
performance. Affective commitment, which reflects the
degree to which employees identify with, are involved in,
and enjoy membership in the organization (Allen & Meyer
1990), is one of the most important attitudes driving individual behavior in the workplace (Meyer et al. 2002). When
employees are emotionally attached to the organization, they
are more likely to exert extra effort toward meeting organizational goals and to desire to continue working with it. In
fact, a meta-analysis by Meyer et al. (2002) demonstrated
that affective commitment is a robust antecedent of both
employee performance and employee turnover. For the
same reasons that we believe fun would have a favorable
impact on employee turnover and performance, we believe
that fun activities and manager support for fun should lead
to greater levels of affective commitment. In support of this
argument, McDowell (2004) demonstrated that fun is positively related to commitment. Given that fun should promote affective commitment and that affective commitment
should favorably influence turnover and performance,
affective commitment is hypothesized to mediate the relationships between the dimensions of fun and the turnover
and performance outcomes.
Hypothesis 5a: The impact of fun activities and manager support for fun on turnover will be meditated by
affective commitment.
Hypothesis 5b: The impact of fun activities and manager support for fun on performance will be meditated
by affective commitment.
Method
Sample
The sample for this study included 195 restaurant servers
from a casual-theme restaurant chain in the United States.
The employees worked in 17 restaurants in one of the company’s regional districts in the Northeastern United States.
The sample was 68 percent female and 72 percent Caucasian.
The average age was 25.67 years. The average organizational
tenure at the beginning of the study period was 1.45 years.
Procedure
We invited 502 servers to participate in our study and complete a survey about their experiences at work. The survey
included items relating to demographic characteristics, fun
activities, manager support for fun, and affective commitment. Of the 502 survey packets sent out, we received 206
with useable data, yielding an initial participation rate of 41
percent. We obtained corporate sales performance data for
each employee for the two weeks following survey administration. Six months later, we checked corporate records
for employees’ voluntary turnover. Eleven participants of
the initial 206 were excluded from the final sample because
they were terminated, resulting in the final sample of 195.
Measures
Fun activities. This fun activities scale included five items
based on Ford, McLaughlin, and Newstrom’s (2003) study.
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Cornell Hospitality Quarterly 54(4)
The scale was refined through discussions with the organization’s vice president of human resources to ensure that
the activities and corresponding item wording were appropriate for the organizational context. The five activities are
as follows: (1) social events (e.g., holiday parties and picnics), (2) teambuilding activities (e.g., company-sponsored
athletic teams and bowling nights), (3) competitions (e.g.,
sales and productivity contests), (4) public celebrations of
work achievements (e.g., public recognition for outstanding
results and employee of the month programs), and (5) recognition of personal milestones (e.g., recognition of birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries of employment). The
employees indicated how frequently each activity occurred
with a 5-point scale ranging from 1 = never to 5 = all the
time. The internal consistency reliability estimate for the
scale was .75.
Manager support for fun. Five items were used to measure
manager support for fun, based on a measure developed by
Shanock and Eisenberger (2006) and adapted to reflect support for having fun in the workplace. Examples include
“My managers care about employees having fun on the job”
and “My managers try to make working here fun.” The
respondents indicated the extent to which they agreed with
each statement using a 5-point response scale ranging from
1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. The internal
consistency reliability estimate for the scale was .97.
Affective commitment. Six items adapted from Meyer and
Allen (1997) were used to measure affective commitment. Sample items included the following: “[Company
name] has a great deal of personal meaning for me” and
“I feel emotionally attached to [company name].” The
respondents again indicated the extent to which they
agreed with each statement using a similar 5-point
response scale. The internal consistency reliability estimate for the scale was .87.
Voluntary turnover. Voluntary turnover was coded dichotomously as 1 for leavers and 0 for stayers. For the final
sample of 195 employees, 58 employees left, and 137
stayed. The voluntary turnover rate for the study period
was 30 percent.
Performance. We measured servers’ performance by their
sales per guest. We focused on sales per guest as opposed to
overall sales because overall sales is more a function of the
number of hours and shifts worked. As indicated above, the
sales data were obtained for the two weeks following survey administration.
Control variables. Employee age, gender, ethnicity, and
prestudy tenure were used as control variables in the analyses. Gender was coded 1 for female and 0 for male. Ethnicity was coded 1 for Caucasian and 0 for other ethnic groups.
Analytic Strategy
Random coefficient modeling (RCM) was used to test the
hypothesized relationships. RCM was used as opposed to
logistic and ordinary least squares regression because the
study participants were nested within restaurants, whereby
the assumption of independence may be violated. Indeed,
the intraclass correlation, ICC(1), estimate was .23 for turnover and .24 for sales performance, indicating that 23 percent of the total variance in employee turnover and 24
percent of the variance in sales performance could be
explained by restaurant location. RCM partitions the total
variance into the within-group and between-group components, thereby controlling for the nonindependence issue
(Bliese and Hanges 2004).
The RCM analyses were performed using the…
