Boundary-Spanning Activity of InterContinental Hotels Group as Conducted in HR Interviews of the Philippine Reservations Office

Abstract

Boundary-spanning is a term that is sometimes taken for granted because of the lack of studies that use the term 'boundary-spanning' to explain how companies expand boundaries especially when it concerns knowledge sharing. Human resource job interviews have also been unchanged for most companies for a long time. Interviewing in general are given importance by all companies although other factors like the amount of information shared of companies are taken as something that is natural to occur when in fact it can be a critical factor to consider especially in times of serious competition. HR interviews, as defined in this study by Edenborough (2002), are affected by factors such as the four factors focused on in this study. These are the manner of interview used, knowledge and attitude of interviewer, content of the interview and the openness of the applicant. The boundary spanning activity in terms of HR interviews has a dependency on these four factors. A high rating for each factor contributes to the idea that the HR interview as a boundary-spanning activity. Boundary-spanning on the other hand relies on the standards of the company on how they would use boundary-spanning as it would show in their HR interviews. The researcher conducted a descriptive study using quantitative and qualitative methods. A sample of 70 job applicants vying for different positions, mainly customer service representative, reservations agent and other positions available, are surveyed using a five-scale questionnaire. The sample was obtained through purposive sampling. The results showed that the HR interviews of InterContinental Hotels Group are indeed conducted as boundary-spanning activities. There are few respondents who have information about the company prior to the job interview and these were obtained through the company website and job postings. The most common facts that they know about the company are the company history and job descriptions. In the perspective of the applicants, they have gathered sufficient information about the company through the help of the job interview conducted by the recruitment specialists of IHG. It can be seen in the study that there is an increase in the number of respondents who answered that they have obtained company information after the job interview. This is validated by the statements of the recruitment specialist of IHG that they share as much information as possible to their potential employees. The factors of successful HR interviews show positive means and percentages. The attitude and the knowledge of the interviewer was the one rated the highest implying that the applicants are focused more on the interviewer and how the interviewer communicates with the applicant. Other factors such as the manner of interview, content of the interview also obtained high marks for the applicants. A correlation was done for the dependency of the factors with each other and the results showed that all factors are positively correlated. The interviews also showed the samples phrases that they use that show how boundary-spanning is done in their company. These are phrases that are explicitly said to educate applicants on the things that the interviewer could share about the company.