Abstract:
Employee turnover in the hotel industry is problematic and can be dysfunctional; there cannot be a
cohesive successful team, if the team members are always changing. However, it is not just the retention
of the staff that is of interest here, it is the examination of those elements of human resource practices,
over which these establishments have some control.The broad objective of this research was to
investigate the effects of job assignment on employee turnover in selected medium size hotels in Kisumu
City. The research sought to establish the extent to which job assignment affected employee turnover. The
research adopted Herzberg‟s two factor theory. The research design was descriptive survey design. A
target of 24 medium size hotels in Kisumu City comprising a population of 350 employees was selected.
Purposive sampling technique was used to select the hotels and simple random sampling used to select
the respondents from the departments. A sample size of six hotels comprising 187 employees and 24
management staff was selected for this study. Collection of data was done using questionnaires
administered to the general employees and management staff. Descriptive (mean, frequency and
percentages) and inferential statistics (Pearson product moment correlation) was used to analyze the
data. The findings indicated that job assignment significantly influence employee turnover (p=.005) 2-
tailed. The low wages, bad management and lack of job security were the factors that made employees to
move from one hotel to another. Job assignment practices reduce employee turnover by ensuring that
there is job flexibility. Assignment of jobs are based on knowledge or skill that one has attained, there is
fairness when assigning tasks, the right job is assigned to the right person and that abilities of employees
are considered. Since most of the employees working in the hotel industry do not have well defined job
description, there is need to for government to enhance policies that will assist in assignment of chores to
the employees.
