Semi-structured interviews in two international fivestar
hotels in Taipei, Taiwan were administered in this
study. Data are presented from individual interviews
with 11 employees from Company A and 10 from
Company B. It was collected from those who had been
with the current company for at least 6 months, as well
as working in the Human Resource, Information
System, and Room divisions. As the interviewees were
selected from the range of the top management level to
the rank-and-file level, all levels of employees were
involved. Each interview lasted between 20–35 min
and where responses were vague or short on detail,
interviewees were prompted to elaborate on what they
had said.
The term knowledge, which was explained prior to
each interview, is defined as the boundaries encompassing
job-related entities (such as operational thoughts,
behaviors, standard operational procedures, organizational
routines, information and strategies about competitors,
and customer knowledge), and individuals’
insights and their past working experience which is
relevant to the current job.
ARTICLE IN PRESS
J.-t. Yang / Tourism Management 25 (2004) 421–428 423
All of the interview texts were coded by using
the ‘‘QSR N5 (NUDIST)’’ tool. All data ‘nodes’
were created. The definitions of the nodes were
conceptually described in ‘memos.’ ‘Tree-structured
catalogues’ for branches of the node tree were
discovered and built. This tree diagram shows how
broader concepts related to learning and knowledge
capturing were gleaned from the interviews. Top layers
of the tree are:knowl edge capturing (including
sub-headings of ‘how people acquire knowledge,’
‘what people acquire knowledge’, ‘attitude to knowledge,’
‘obstacles of knowledge acquisition’) and organizational
learning (including sub-categories of ‘individual
learning attitude,’ ‘the reasoning process,’ ‘no adjustment,’
‘think–rethink,’ ‘reflection,’ and ‘change’). In order
to develop the meanings of text units, a whole paragraph
of contexts was coded on the basis of the definitions of
the nodes.