Human resource management in the Bulgarian hotel industry 177
are chosen on the basis of exam results in foreign languages. Not surprisingly these
candidates sometimes fail to possess other characteristics which might equip them better
for the job content of the posts to which they are recruited. Once recruited, candidates
tend to be given permanent contracts rather than trial period or short-term contracts, as is
more common in the U.K.
In recent years the British hotel companies have moved towards more flexible human
resource policies, using both functional and numerical flexibility (Atkinson, 1984; Guerrier
and Lockwood, 1989) to take account of different demand over the working day, week
and year: thus, to have been increasingly pursuing 'hard' HRM policies. The survey and
interviews with general managers of British hotels also reveal that the bigger independent
hotels and chain hotels are increasingly employing permanent part-time staff who are part
of the establishment and are provided with similar benefits to full-time staff. A very few
companies claimed to be beginning to experiment with job share schemes and the
provision of workplace creches to attract and retain married women employees. The
Bulgarian employers in the hospitality industry have considerably less flexible policies.
The percentage of establishments which employ part-time employees is four times lower
(23% as opposed to 93% in the U.K.) and the proportion of hotels employing casual
employees is infinitely smaller (5% rather than 56%). At the same time, nearly 80% of
employers in the resort hotels are temporary staff, employed for the season as they are
required. As the empirical evidence confirms, this limited numerical flexibility is not
reinforced by functional flexibility. The overwhelming majority of employees are full-time
and have narrowly-defined jobs, both in terms of job satisfaction and custom and practice,
which do not allow for interchangeability of personnel or flexible work practices.
There is very little evidence of induction training in the Bulgarian hotel industry and
indeed very little evidence of investment in training and development generally, largely
because of the recession throughout the last 3 years which has curtained investment in such
activity. In comparison with the British sample (whose own record is very poor by national
cross-sectional comparison) the Bulgarian respondents invested very little in human
resources training. For instance, only 6% provide training in 'supervisory skills' although
they had said that supervisors tended to be recruited in the internal labour market. The
survey information indicates that only one-fifth of the establishments invest any money at
all in training of their operatives. The same pattern is replicated in relation to employee
appraisal practices, with British hotels not substantially likely to have appraisal programmes,
although 65% claimed to appraise employees at least every 2 years. The
comparable figure for Bulgarian respondents was substantially lower and while nearly half
claimed to appraise employees regularly, at intervals ranging between 1 and 2 years, the
notion of employee appraisal was foreign to most of the Bulgarian managers interviewed.
The question is consequently likely to have been misunderstood by many of those who
completed the postal survey, and thus to reflect an overestimated incidence of appraisal.
In addition, the answers given verbally and pattern of response on the questionnaires
suggest that the Bulgarian managers tended to implement a 'telling' or 'dominating' style
of appraisal rather than an 'advising' style which concentrates on counselling and problemsolving.
Without an appraisal system, staff development tends to be ad hoc and infrequent
in the Bulgarian industry, with promotion and mobility between establishments relatively
rare. The payment of service increments in recognition of seniority is, however, more
widespread in the Bulgarian than the U.K. industry. In all Bulgarian hotels the employees