Motivation of seasonal front-line workers A study at Gröna Lund’s Tivoli

Abstract

The front-line workers have an important role in the service delivery, in order to provide good service quality. What workers experience in their work will transmit to the customers and affect the experience of customers. Due to the increase in temporary employment in tourism & hospitality industry during the past decades, this thesis is to enlarge our understanding of the motivation of seasonal front-line workers in an amusement park. The case study was based on Gröna Lund’s Tivoli, the second largest amusement park in Sweden. The aim of the thesis is to identify and analyze the motivational factors which affect the behaviours of workers.

Our main findings show that the front-line staff in Gröna Lund is motivated by intrinsic as well as extrinsic motivational factors. The intrinsic motivational factors include personal reasons, personal work ethics and the characteristics of people. These factors could be regarded as the basic factors motivating the employees to perform the work, but will not push the workers to better performance. In that sense, customers, teamwork and leadership which are regarded as extrinsic motivational factors, play a more important role for management. These could be controlled by managers to trigger their employees to perform better.

The value of the thesis is to contribute knowledge for better understanding of seasonal front-line workers in a particular setting and emphasize management to pay attention to employees themselves to achieve high service quality.