Shaping organizational culture in response to tourism seasonality: A qualitative approach

Introduction

Seasonality is a common feature of the tourism industry and is one of the most documented issues in the tourism literature. Tourism demand and market segment fluctuations caused by seasonal variations, thereby affecting tourist flow, is determined by seasonal vicissitudes. According to Butler (2001), ‘seasonality is a temporal imbalance in the phenomenon of tourism, which may be expressed regarding dimensions of such elements as numbers of visitors, expenditure, traffic on highways and other forms of transportation, employment and admissions to attractions’ (p. 5). Seasonality influences the economic vitality of the tourism industry; however, some argued that seasonality has positive implications in terms of sustainability, minimizing overcrowding and resource exploitation, and providing time for recovery (Butler, 2001; Matheison and Wall, 2006). Compared to the impact of seasonality in tourism, less research has been conducted regarding tourism organization’s response to seasonal demand variation (Connell et al., 2015; Senbeto and Hon, 2019). Response to seasonality requires strenuous efforts to attract demand and create market strategies and modifications to address off-season demand. Recently, Pham et al. (2018) examine the phenomenon of seasonality in rural tourism destinations, and they have noticed that tourism organizations’ views toward seasonal variation are sought for further investigation. Hence, research is needed to understand tourism organization’s response to seasonal variation, factors influencing their responses, and approaches to tackle off-season market challenges.

Organizational culture fueled by shared values, attitudes, and perceptions can play a crucial role in promoting or inhibiting firms’ response to seasonality in tourism. Building on exploratory research design, Reichel and Haber (2005) noted that organizational culture could positively influence a business’s success concerning seasonality. More importantly, with its influence on certain organizational norms, values, procedures, and perceptions and organizational decision-making, organizational culture reveals an organization’s responsiveness to situations such as seasonality, as well as its readiness to change and to tackle difficult situations (Armenakis et al., 1993; Hogan and Coote, 2014; Schein, 1992). Some tourism firms may react proactively and tackle seasonality by using several product and marketing strategies, such as discounts and product packaging and bundling. In contrast, others may exhibit a submissive attitude toward the status quo of seasonal variation or purely depend on the peak season market (Banki et al., 2016; Getz and Nilsson, 2004; Jolliffe and Farnsworth, 2003). Hence, there is a question: Why and how different organizational cultures and values calibrated to respond to seasonality?

Toward that end, the present study examines tourism organizations’ responses to seasonal variation from the viewpoint of organizational cultures and values. Precisely, the study’s aim is threefold: 1) Examines tourism organizations’ response to seasonality, 2) Assesses response to tourism seasonality guided by organizational cultures and regulatory focus process, and; 3) Explores the main features of tourism seasonality in the less-developed countries setting. The study offers several contributions to the existing literature. Theoretically, this study provides insights to understand features and responses to seasonality by considering the influence of organizational cultures and managers’ regulatory focus strategies. The study explores tourism seasonality features in the less-developed world context, given the empirical gap on the unbalanced distribution of research on tourism seasonality across developed and less-developed contexts (Banki et al., 2016; Chen and Pearce, 2012; Koenig-Lewis and Bischoff, 2005; Senbeto and Hon, 2019). Practically, this study provides contributions for tourism organizations and managers by considering several organizational culture types and understanding managers’ regulatory foci in response to tourism seasonality. The findings may benefit efforts to enhance tourism development in the less-developed countries by tackling seasonal variation, thereby assisting SDG goals, particularly goal 8 regarding organizational success and growth in the less-developed nations (UN, 2018).

Organizational cultures and response to tourism seasonality

Studies have noted that organizational culture matters for a firm’s response to challenging situations such as crisis management (Goby and Nickerson, 2015; Senbeto & Chan, 2021), acquiescent response (Chen et al., 2017), creativity and innovation promotion (Hon and Leung, 2011; Hon et al., 2014), and turbulent environments (Liu and Almor, 2016). Thus, literature has been suggesting organizational culture’s necessity to achieve a competitive advantage in the market. Several studies have examined the impact of different cultures on organizational outcomes (e.g., Hon and Leung, 2011; Quinn and Spreitzer, 1991). Researchers tend to consider organizational culture as a business strategy used in shaping innovative behavior, market orientation, and competition (Amabile et al., 2004; Barney, 1986; Hon and Leung, 2011; Hon et al., 2015). This implies that firm productivity and performance are determined by organizational cultural values that assist in ensuring success and adaptation to situations. Organizational culture and values reflect the perception and belief shared by members of an organization; hence, examining culture and values offer an understanding of internal and external interaction, performance, and reaction to situations (Schein, 1990; Wiewiora et al., 2013). Organizational culture can also be viewed as a cognitive barricade or supportive mechanism, with ‘powerful means to elicit desired organizational outcomes’ (Hogan and Coote, 2014).

In probing organizational success, Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) identified a two-by-two model underlying value dimensions that include flexibility and control. More importantly, based on value-based culture framework, Cameron and Quinn (1999) and Quinn (1988) further categorize organizational culture into four types: clan, adhocracy, hierarchy, and market, which have also been used in the recent literature to explain organizations’ response to situations (Engelen et al., 2014; Golden and Shriner, 2019; Liao, 2018; Marín et al., 2016). Besides, examining tourism seasonality responses via regulatory foci involves two mechanisms (Higgins, 1998; Senbeto and Hon, 2019): promotion and prevention focus. A promotion focus implies an individual’s intention to develop ideas and procedures that lead them to aspiration and accomplishment, whereas a prevention focus indicates an individual’s attention to safety and protection that push them to focus on the status quo rather than moving forward. Guided by organizational culture and values and regulatory focus theory, Figure 1 exhibits the two pairs of dimensions of the promotion-prevention approach and flexibility vs control to explain responses to tourism seasonality from organizational culture context.

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Figure 1.

Response to tourism seasonality: culture and regulatory focus regulatory model. Source: Organizational culture competing values and regulatory focus framework (adapted from Higgins, 1998; Quinn and Rohrbaugh, 1983; Quinn and Spreitzer, 1991).

The framework guided the present study to investigate hospitality firms’ internal and external aspects in response to seasonality. In line with this, this study highlights the importance of managing seasonality in tourism to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly goal 8 referring to tourism’s prominence to ensure job opportunity and economic growth in the less-developed world context. Goal 8 embraces economic growth based on facilitating organization’s intention and ability to manage challenges and using alternative work approaches and procedures (UN, 2018). Hence, maintaining organizational and marketing strategies and operating throughout the year is considered the principal intent of the hospitality organization toward achieving sustainable development goal 8.

Methods

Study context, sampling, and analysis

Although seasonal variation is becoming a common phenomenon for tourism organizations in less-developed countries, prior research has paid less attention to tourism seasonality in such parts of the world (Banki et al., 2016; Senbeto and Hon, 2019). Building on critical tourism discourse analysis on less-developed world context, Carson (2015) suggested that seasonality, crises, changing market demand, and competition, need crucial attention in the tourism industry in the less-developed world context. For example, with a proven record of day-to-day growth in the tourism sector and the introduction of international hotel chains, Ethiopia has been considered a promising destination for international hotel chain development and improvement (Fortanier and Van Wijk, 2010; Senbeto, 2019). However, the challenge of seasonal variation has negative implications for the country’s tourism sector’s growth, coupled with service quality and human resource development issues. Based on a tourism stakeholders’ discussion in Ethiopia, UNECA (2015) identified that seasonality reduces tourism and hospitality contribution to its economy. Hence, this study’s focus is timely and necessary to enrich our understanding of how different organizational culture and values can influence hotels’ strategies in response to tourism seasonality in a less-developed context.

Bearing in mind that subjectivity is the only way of unlocking the constructions held by individuals and the emergence of ‘multiple dashes of realism’ is useful, we adopted a qualitative design to explore tourism seasonality issues and responses (Jennings, 2001). A purposive sampling technique was utilized on pre-determined criteria. As shown in Table 1, hotel managers in Ethiopia were selected as the focus of this study; given the pre-determined selection criterion, managers have experienced seasonality in their business. Managers’ responses to seasonality can be gleaned through informed constructions, perceptions, and experiences arising from organizational cultures to determine reactions to seasonality. In-depth and semi-structured in-depth interviews with 19 managers were conducted to collect various information and perspectives, opinions, and experiences without constraints (Henderson and Bialeschki, 2002; Patton, 2002). As Table 1 shows, we choose hotels located in three different regions. These places are known to have a large concentration of hotels and tourism and hospitality development. The study selected a smaller number of respondents from hotels outside of Addis Ababa due to the limited availability of hotels and respondents.

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Table 1.

Socio-demographic profile of respondents.

		Number	%
Location	Addis Ababa	13	68.5
	Debrezeit	4	21
	Hawassa	2	10.5
Age	18–30 years	2	10.5
	31–45 years	9	47.4
	46–54 years	6	31.6
	Above 55 years	2	10.5
Work experience	1–3 years	3	16
	4–7 years	5	26
	8–10 years	6	32
	Above 10 years	5	26
Education	Diploma	3	16
	Bachelor degree	9	47
	Post-graduate level	7	37

The interview questions were partly guided by previous tourism seasonality literature (e.g., Banki et al., 2016; Getz and Nilsson, 2004; Pegg et al., 2012). The interview was divided into three parts: The first part focuses on the cause and impact of seasonality in the hotel industry in Ethiopia. At the second and third phases, we asked participants to elucidate their organizational cultures and values, and how their regulatory process enables or influences response to seasonality. The interviews were lasted between 30 minutes and 1 hour. With the permission of the interviewees, the interviews were recorded. The research team then manually transcribed the recorded interviews. To ensure trustworthiness, we have checked accurate descriptions, and interpretations with respondents (Birt et al., 2016). We have also referred secondary sources such as reports and documents related to tourism master plan, hospitality and tourism reports, and sustainable development goals. The study followed exploratory qualitative data analysis techniques for data analysis. Exploratory qualitative data analysis allows for the amalgamation of data from several sources to draw generalizations and generate understanding from shared realities, experiences and opinions (Cox, 2017; Young, 1981). After manually transcribing the interviews, the transcribed data were coded and analyzed according to concepts and indicators of clearly defined issues.

Findings and discussion

Respondents were allowed to think of several features of seasonal variation and their influence of seasonal variation on their business, along with their experience in responding to off-season market challenges. The findings explain the main features of seasonal variation from demand fluctuation and hospitality service provider’s settings. From demand perspectives, respondents have noted several factors concerning natural, institutional, and unforeseen factors like crisis and uncertainties resulted in a fluctuation of demand. The finding discusses the response to tourism seasonality from organizational culture, values, and regulatory process theories and contexts.

Response to tourism seasonality: Culture and regulatory focus regulatory model

This study examines how tourism managers mitigate seasonality and what factors could promote or inhibit their reaction to seasonal variation. In this regard, respondents mentioned that an organization’s culture and its regulatory processes determine whether it attempts to promote or inhibit a response to seasonal variation. This view is similar to Schein (1992) and Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) view different types of organizational cultures and values on driving the initiation of action to achieve organizational goals and motivate responses to seasonal variation. Several studies have demonstrated organizational cultures’ role and their influence on interpretations of and reactions to tourism seasonality (e.g., Barney, 1986; Hon and Leung, 2011; Naranjo-Valencia et al., 2016; Sarooghi et al., 2015). Respondents mentioned that regulatory processes ingrained by a promotion or prevention focus could determine their response to seasonality. This implies that managers with a promotion focus exhibit a willingness to initiate actions to tackle seasonality because they are driven by development and change-oriented goals. In contrast, managers with prevention focus show less willingness to initiate actions to move forward or challenge seasonality because they are afraid of taking risks or the risk of failure associated with such activities.

This study indicates that response to seasonality is influenced by the types of hotel culture and managers’ promotion or prevention strategies in their decision-making since East and West cross-cultural signs have been observed within the Ethiopian organizational culture. For example, internally, some managers create a conducive work environment to encourage group cohesiveness, mutual trust, participatory decision-making, communication flow, and experience sharing among coworkers. Such cooperation supports idea generation and working mechanisms or shares previous efforts and decisions related to marketing efforts during the off-season. As one respondent (T16) stated:

…during the low season, employees actively cooperate to attract markets; they sometimes use self-networking and coordination strategies to search for new or retain existing, market potential, such as events…birthdays and other gatherings, and selling pastry products.

According to our findings, organizational cultures can be categorized as a market, adhocracy, clan, and hierarchical. In addition to organizational culture, managers’ self-regulation processes (Higgins, 1998) determine firms’ strategic plan and respond to seasonality. Our findings indicate that a promotion-focus strategy drives adhocracy or clan organizational cultures that derive searching for alternative market mechanisms to curb off-season challenges. In contrast, hierarchical and a market culture pursue the prevention-focused strategy and accept seasonal variation or explore the status quo to gain a competitive advantage with hard-driving work structure. Managers with a prevention focus approach restrain themselves from searching for new markets or less-developed new or extra activities to avoid any adverse outcomes associated with creative actions.

Organizational constraints in response to seasonality

Respondents also mentioned several constraints that contextually influence seasonality responses. Such constraints can be categorized into two: internal and external (Barki and Pinsonneault, 2005). Internal constraints are associated with finance and human resource limitations, location, distribution channels, facilities and resources, and higher turnover rate. These constraints can aggravate the impact of seasonality and minimize hotels’ motivation to tackle the issue, as these comments (T3, T11, and T15) illustrate:

Although we are motivated to mitigate the off-season problem, financial limitations caused by bank debt that restrict our off-season market strategy’s feasibility. (T3)

Human resource issues and a lack of fully-fledged marketing strategies are some of the main challenges that affect our response to seasonality. (T15)

Because of our location and distribution channel, our market is only based on peak season tourism demand. (T11)

Conclusion and implications

This study explores the features of seasonality and tourism organizations response to seasonality from the perspectives of organizational culture and regulatory processes. The findings revealed that in addition to the commonly known natural and institutional factors of tourism seasonality, type of hotel, location, the occurrence of crises, and perceived destination image are vital factors influencing tourism organization’s response to seasonal variation. Our findings indicated a substantial disparity among the interviewees regarding their experience and reactions to seasonality. Collaboration among team members, creating new services or marketing mechanisms, and embracing the status quo of seasonal variation was mentioned as the main features of tourism firms’ responses to seasonality. Guided by organizational cultures and regulatory focus theory, this study examined response to seasonality from four organizational culture contexts: clan, adhocracy, hierarchical, and market cultures. These four cultures revealed what marketing strategy that organizations will adopt to respond to seasonal variation. First, a clan culture supports promotion and flexibility strategy, which encourages collaboration and teamwork among organizational members and pays attention to long-term change in response to tourism seasonality. Second, a hierarchical culture emphasizes prevention and control strategy, which focuses on conservative and cautious decision-making in response to seasonality.

Third, an adhocracy culture concentrates on flexibility and promotion positioning, which represents a development strategy. This culture focuses on innovation, opening rooms for change, and favors a risk-taking work environment in tackling seasonality. Market culture stresses prevention focus, control positioning and setting goals to attain competitive advantage in response to seasonal variation. Generally, the framework exhibits these cultures and regulatory focus and values that could determine response to seasonality whether hotels enable or influence seasonality. This is consistent with previous findings indicating a variation in organizations’ response to Seasonality (Banki et al., 2016; Getz and Nilsson, 2004; Jolliffe and Farnsworth, 2003); some organizations initiate strategies to tackle seasonality, while others passively accept the existing situation. In summary, seasonality is a practical concern for the tourism business. The culture-process-response model helps to examine how organizational culture determines the regulatory process that managers followed in response to seasonality in the tourism organization setting. Our model offers a comprehensive understanding of the reactions of tourism organizations and individuals to seasonality, and it demonstrates the influence of promotion and prevention foci mechanisms on individuals’ responses to seasonality, which are influenced by the organizational culture in which they operate.

Theoretical implications

The study’s theoretical implications are threefold. First, this study explains tourism organizations’ responses to seasonality, answering previous studies’ call to investigate how tourism enterprises respond to Seasonality (Connell et al., 2015; Goulding et al., 2005). Second, the study provides empirical findings that help us understand the reasons behind tourism organizations’ responses to seasonality by examining organizational cultures and managers’ regulatory processes. The framework provides answers to help solve the parallel questions of why hotels actively or passively react to seasonality. In addition, it shows how organizational culture and regulatory focus are seen as mechanisms that promote or prevent managers’ responses to the off-season. The findings provide better understanding about the features and responses to seasonality in a micro-level tourism organization setting. Such theoretical inputs could contribute to theoretical development in tourism seasonality research (Boffa and Succurro, 2012) in which further research questions and hypotheses can be tested.

Third, this study examines responses to seasonality in tourism in less-developed countries located in Africa where there is lack of enough studies in such place settings (Banki et al., 2016; Chen and Pearce, 2012; Senbeto and Hon, 2019). Given these precepts, we supplement comprehensive outlook of tourism seasonality from both demand and supplier perspectives (Senbeto and Hon, 2019), and offers mutual benefits to the hotel, tourism, marketing, and management fields in relation to seasonality. The study covers the main features of seasonality in tourism settings and explores the opportunities and constraints faced by tourism organizations in tackling seasonality.

Managerial implications

The current study suggests several practical implications to the tourism seasonality literature, specifically applying to the tourism industries. It is axiomatic that seasonality is an inescapable phenomenon in the hospitality industry that affects the performance and productivity of the hotel industry. Tourism organizations’ response to seasonality needs to be known (Baum and Lundtorp, 2001; Coshall et al., 2015) aiming a return on investment throughout the year. In response to this, this study unpacks practical notions about responses to seasonality in the hotel setting. Given the consequences of seasonality and off-season market-related challenges, managers need to consider strategies to manage seasonal variation by identifying and attracting off-season market demand. In relation to that endeavor, we suggest that managers consider several changing market trends, influencing the regular seasonal trend. For example, in our study, diaspora tourism can be considered as a viable off-season market segment.

Managers should consider the organization’s culture and contextual factors to respond to the extent of seasonal variation and facilitate hotels’ efforts to curb the off-season’s challenges. Such a culture also strengthens awareness of guest demand variation across seasons, expedites psychological remedies, and challenges established working mechanisms. Work cultures need to be promoted to offer an open environment and provide a chance for employees to take risks in their attempts to try new and alternative working mechanisms during the off-season. For example, Alananzeh et al. (2015) asserted that miscommunications, deviance, negative relationships, and conflict with coworkers during work hours exacerbate the negative consequences of seasonality for the hotel business. This study suggests that tourism organizations need to consider transforming work culture by embracing innovative and collaborative work culture and environment to mitigate seasonality. This can be achieved through practicing solicit regular feedback to employees, supporting flexibility, decentralizing decision-making, promoting strong coworker relationships and teamwork.

The study suggests the need to consider contextual factors related to internal and external driving forces are essential in managing seasonality. For example, crisis occurrences are becoming the principal factors of disturbing the regular off-peak season tourism business. Thus, managers need to have a flexible attitude and pursue contingency strategies to deal with seasonality caused by crises, economic downturns, and uncertainties. In addition, internal strategies like market distribution channels, need considerable attention to combat seasonality. For example, targeting the local market and expanding facilities to address further market demand is prominent in the off-season. To achieve this, managers need to maintain cohesiveness, mutual trust, empowerment, and participatory decision-making in their strategy to tackle seasonality. Finally, the findings will help prospective investors and policymakers to understand how tourism enterprises could proactively react to seasonal variation before entering the tourism business. In supporting the SDGs (goal 8—related to sustainable economic growth) in less-developed countries, the study stresses the need for policymakers to ponder the role of firm culture and its importance to cope with seasonal variation in the tourism business.

Limitations and directions for further research

This study examines the main features of seasonality and responses to seasonality in tourism. However, it has several limitations. We acknowledge that it may be difficult to generalize from our findings because of the study’s small sample size, even though qualitative data with 15–30 interviews is sufficient for a representative sample (Marshall et al., 2013). We faced several challenges in determining the sample size: cost, time, location, and willingness of individuals to participate in the study. In addition, although we made efforts to ensure objectivity in addressing the research questions, it is not safe to say that the research design (i.e., qualitative) was free from subjectivity (Bryman and Bell, 2011). Hence, future studies could consider a large sample size across regions and hotel types and employ a quantitative methodology to ensure the validity and reliability of the proposed model and measure the effectiveness of the recommendations featured in this study. To ensure validity and generalization in the tourism industry domain, further studies are deemed necessary in several tourism segments (e.g., tour operators and destination management organizations). Testing the framework using a multi-method approach in several cultural, geographic, and socio-demographic contexts is also necessary. For example, longitudinal and experimental studies are essential to test the moderating effect of regulatory focus strategies and contextual factors on the relationship between organizational cultures and response to seasonality. Quantitative studies are encouraged to compare the extent of tourism organizations’ success in their response to seasonality.

Since seasonality affects investment expansion, return on investment, employment, and financial and market scenarios, further studies are needed to examine variations in seasonal tourists and related tourism phenomena. Above all, consumer perceptions and reactions to seasonal variation are essential for recognizing the comprehensive aspects of seasonality and its responses from both the supply and the demand side. Further theoretical views can be considered to examine the various features of seasonal variation in the tourism business such as theory of reasoned action (Prayag et al., 2013), social exchange theory (Vargas-Sánchez et al., 2014), financial portfolio theory (Soo Cheong, 2004), and traditional pricing theory (Jeffrey and Barden, 1999). While previous studies focused on hotel establishments, little is known about seasonality in other tourism segments. Hence, future research could explore seasonal variation in several accommodation types, such as private accommodation, campsites, youth hostels, cruise ships, and farm-based guesthouses.