İŞE YABANCILAŞMA BOYUTLARININ DEMOGRAFİK DEĞİŞKENLER AÇISINDAN İNCELENMESİ
EXAMINING THE DIMENSIONS OF WORK ALIENATION IN TERMS OF DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS

Summary/Abstract: Today, rapid improvement in science and technology leads to change in value judgements in individual, social and cultural fields. This change leads to a decrease in the sense of trust among people, degeneration of value systems, lack of communication, social dissonance, increase in individualism and loneliness, which cause psychological and social problems that negatively affect work life and daily life of people. One of these problems is work alienation.Alienation can be explained as one’s breaking away from him/herself, from his/her product, from his/her natural and social environment. Work alienation is defined as the state of psychological separation from work resulting from the perception that work itself is unable to satisfy personal needs and expectations. But, it is quite hard to give a precise definition of work alienation concept. According to Seeman (1971), who settled the long-lasting confusion on the meaning of the term, work alienation should be studied under five independent yet related sub-categories. These categories can be explained briefly as follows:Powerlessness: One’s belief that his/her behavior or effort would not affect the outcome.Meaninglessness: Occurs when one cannot predict the possible outcomes of certain behavior.Normlessness: The belief that certain accomplishments can be achieved only by the means which are not acceptable to society.Isolation: Attaching little importance to the values and causes that society has a high opinion.Self-Estrangement: Occurs when one cannot be satisfied by merely doing his/her work.Success in hotel business depends on direct communication with guests, intangibility and complexity of the product, the difficulty of measuring the service quality, and importance of communication between those working in a hotel. Thus, work alienation in hotel enterprises has become one of the critical success factors that need to be addressed. Knowing these factors allows managers to take relevant measures with the work alienation. Demographic factors take the first place among these. Therefore, the aim of this research is to determine whether the work alienation dimensions of hotel employees' differ according to the demographic factors.The population of the study is made up of hotel employees working in the hotel business in Ayvalık. To collect data for the study, the survey technique was utilized, and the data was collected from 345 hotel employees who were selected by convenience sampling. The data was collected between July 2017 and September 2017.The questionnaire form consists of two parts. The first part of the questionnaire form includes questions about the demographic characteristics of the participants. In the second section, there is the “Work Alienation Scale” which was developed by Seeman (1983) and adapted into Turkish by Tekin (2012). The work alienation scale is a measuring instrument including 24 items and 5 points Likert type scale (1= Strongly disagree; 5= Completely agree). The data obtained from the research was analyzed with SPSS package program.The exploratory factor analysis was conducted for five dimensions of work alienation scale, and the Kaiser Mayer Olkin and Bartlett’s tests were used. And also, the data obtained were analyzed using descriptive statistics techniques and non-parametric tests such as Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis-H tests. The Kaiser Mayer Olkin coefficient in this study has been determined as 0.72. This result is considered suitable for factor analysis (Büyüköztürk, 2006). According to the factor analysis, five sub-dimensions have been found. These factors are powerlessness, meaningfulness, normlessness, isolation and self-estrangement. Coefficient value for overall Cronbach's Alpha reliability of alienation scale was calculated as 0.79. According to this result, the scale can be considered reliable.The differences between the demographic factors of a hotel employee and their work alienation were examined in this article. The primary outcome is the fact that the alienation level in the hotels that the survey was conducted has been found near average (x ̅=2.85). Other than these results, it has also been found that the age characteristics of the hotel employees can be described "Young" (less than 34 years). Also, 87.2% of the survey participants worked less than ten years in the hotel business.The findings of the research indicate that employees’ levels of the work alienation were near average and they have the highest alienation level for isolation, whereas the lowest alienation level is on the dimension of powerlessness. According to the findings of the study, it was determined that the gender of employees creates a significant difference in the meaninglessness dimension. The education status is effective on powerlessness while the age and the department create a significant difference in the self-estrangement sub-dimensions. Furthermore, the working duration of employees is effective on powerlessness, normlessness, isolation and self-estrangement while hotel class is efficient on powerlessness, isolation and work alienation. However, the marital status of employees does not make a meaningful difference regarding the dimensions of work alienation.Undoubtedly, one of the most important factors for hotel business success is employees. Also, it is a known fact that employee behavior and performance are related to many individual and organizational variables. One of the variables that effect hotel employees' performance, productivity and profitability is work alienation. When the literature is reviewed, it is seen that organizational alienation has many negative effects on job satisfaction, organizational silence, burn-out, work-life quality, organizational commitment, employee turnover and productivity. Therefore, some measures should be taken against alienation. The findings of the study suggest that some measures should be taken to prevent or reduce the work alienation of employees in hotel businesses. Improving long and exhausting working conditions resulting from the operating structure of hotel enterprises, ensuring justice in the division of labor and compensation, protecting the social rights of employees are some of the measures that can be taken. Also, to value the employees, to ensure that they participate in decisions, to promote social participation and to use effective motivation tools will also contribute to the prevention of work alienation. In spite of all these practices, providing social support and providing psychological counselling to the employees who are having problems outside of business life will be effective in reducing alienation.

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