Navigations for Hospitality Human Resource Management Research: Observing the Keywords, Factors, Topics under the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The hospitality industry is one of the most affected by the pandemic, and because of its human close interaction and labor-intensive characteristics, it has left Human Resource Management (HRM) puzzles with organizations’ stabilization and recovery. This study aimed to summarize current research on hospitality HRM research outcomes and trends during the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing the PRISMA technique and NVivo software, 102 research articles were extracted and analyzed to highlight to overall achievement and movement of hospitality HRM research under the shadow of the COVID-19 crisis. Considering the main purpose of this study, which was to show the status and prospects, the findings indicated 309 free nodes and 26 secondary nodes based on grounded theory. 7 key themes clustered from the analysis and include “environmental factors”, “industrial factors”, “HRM practice”, “organization”, “employee”, “external outcomes”, and “methodology”. The results demonstrated the COVID-19 pandemic driven HRM transformation. In addition, it sheds light on how research responds to the shifting navigation of HRM within the hospitality context under the COVID-19 conditions.

1. Introduction

The new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has swept the earth rapidly, alarming and shaking the predominantly offline operated industry. Instead, industries with a solid foundation of information technology and automation have stronger resilience to cope with the crisis. For instance, in the manufacturing industry, business operations have been negatively impacted, while revenue growth has occurred in the online gaming industry. More obviously, the education industry is taking steps to seek ways to move from its offline to online operations [1].

Among these industries, the hospitality industry looked to be on the cusp of the pandemic [1]. This is because of its sensitivity to political and economic instability, pandemics, disasters, public incidents [2]. The overall inevitability and seemingly insurmountable obstacles appear in hotels [3], foodservices [4,5], bars [6], and other hospitality businesses [7]. To cope with pandemic influences, the hospitality industry may have to adopt more innovative practices.

Along with the external marketing environment challenges, the internal marketing environment of the hospitality industry has changed radically simultaneously. As a service-providing industry, the linkage between internal and external marketing is essential for the hospitality industry. HRM places great emphasis on providing employees and external customers with the preconditions for satisfaction. HRM should take the helm and develop capabilities to face the unprecedented changes. Many scholars have shown concern for a re-assessment of HRM because of the contextual backdrop [8]. For instance, several scholars have called for a greater focus on employee nature. The concept of “people-based” or “people-powered” has reappeared on the protagonist stage under the pandemic [9]. Another critical recurring theme is organizational health and safety risks [10]. Furthermore, researchers proposed leading-edge concepts such as HR co-creation [11], agile HR [12], flexible working arrangements [13], requiring more studies on HR strategy and practice. The existing trends and crises have also driven various HRM disciplines across borders. There is still a lack of research on hospitality HRM resilience and reaction facing the crisis era. Specifically, a research gap exists when it comes to providing crossroads and mega-trends within hospitality HRM.

In light of these challenges, the study aimed to (1) explore the published paper status in the hospitality HRM field under the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) extract the keywords and themes concerning hospitality HRM within the COVID-19 pandemic environment; (3) propose research directions related to hospitality HRM and the COVID-19 pandemic. In accordance with previous research exploring thematic context within hospitality HRM, this study utilized the PRISMA flow technique to ensure reliable data collection progress [14]. Instead of applying text mining for bibliometric analysis and topic modeling for qualitative data analysis, this study employed the NVivo approach for thematic analysis as advocated by Braun and Clarke, 2006 [15].

2. Literature Review

2.1. Hospitality Industry and Crisis

Although the boundaries are difficult to define, the hospitality industry generally refers to enterprises that provide entertainment, travel distribution channels, travel accommodation, and foodservices for travelers [16]. Scholars have outlined four main approaches to describe the nature of hospitality, they are professionalism, hospitableness, experience, and philosophy [17]. Due to the immense scale of the industry, which has grown to include theme parks, airlines, cruise ships, trade shows, fairs, and gaming as well [18], the hospitality industry has become one of the world’s most significant and essential employers [19].

The hospitality industry has been most affected and threatened by crises and disasters [1,20,21]. How the industry responded to the crisis and disasters is a crucial area of research concern. For instance, Chien and Law, 2003 [22] addressed the risk identification, assessment, and alleviation based on the SARS crisis. Wen, Huimin, and Kavanaugh, 2005 [23] conducted a survey investigating SARS’s impact on Chinese tourists. Kim, Chun, and Lee, 2005 [24] examined the Korean hotel industry for evidence on crisis management. Lee, Song, Bendle, Kim, and Han, 2012 [25] investigated how the H1N1 virus affected potential travelers’ decision-making processes. Hung, Mark, Yeung, Chan, and Graham, 2018 [26] developed a case study focused on published guidelines in Hong Kong regarding SARS and H1N1. They described how the hospitality industry is responding to the pandemic. Park, Kim, and Choi, 2019 [27] reported communication environment of social media context changes before and during the Irma hurricane. The authors developed an analytical framework that emphasizes the role of influential actors.

The hospitality industry is facing a superimposed challenge under the pressure of the COVID-19 crisis. For the sake of minimizing the unfavorable wreckage on the hospitality industry due to crisis, scholars tried to offer strategies for surviving even development for hospitality on dry land. Alan, So, and Sin, 2006 [28] laid stress on the need reduce investment and increase negotiation under SARS background. Using a hybrid of humans and machines, Pillai, Haldorai, Seo, and Kim, 2021 [29] boosted Hospitality 5.0 by ensuring hygiene operations and safe accessibility to touchpoints under the COVID-19 pandemic. Im, Kim, and Miao, 2021 [30] noted while reviewing other specific strategies involved, such as restructuring and layoffs, reducing costs and saving cash, changing the way services are delivered, and complying with updated standards but the loss of profits. Moreover, scholars utilized big data analysis to point out delivery, no-touch, and online shopping emerging as the leading trends for foodservices [4]. Similarly, Mun, Ban, and Kim, 2020 [5] mentioned the new concept sand products emerging due to rapid changes in the hospitality industry in the pandemic era. Thus, there is a need to revise the situation of the hospitality industry and verify the drivers of successful recovery paths in the COVID-19 crisis [20].

2.2. Hospitality HRM

The most widely used definition of human resource management is the one defined by Snell and Bohlander, 2010 [31] which describes it as a process for managing human capital to achieve the organization’s goals. The hospitality industry is a labor-intensive industry, and this feature provides an excellent research environment for exploring HRM issues. In addition to having essential and practical HR functions, such as integrating resources, managing employees, cultivating capabilities, formulating strategies, improving performance, and achieving organizational goals, hospitality HRM also needs to assist the hotel industry in providing high-quality services to customers and maintaining customer relationships, moreover, promoting core competencies while the pursuit of organizational success. In addition to this, the people in the hospitality sector include both employees and customers. Therefore, HRM for hospitality is recognized as a critical element for connecting customers and transforming services, building core competencies, and improving internal and external performance [32].

In hospitality HRM research, the content analysis approach has been observed for decades. A literature review by Guerrier and Deery, 1998 [33] based on 156 publications about hospitality industry HRM research, evaluates the status of hospitality HRM research. The researchers summarized their findings in a multilevel mechanism: marketing, organizational, and employee level. Singh, Hu, and Roehl, 2007 [34] conducted a qualitative research on the development progress (1994–2003) of hospitality HRM literature and proposed nine major HRM research aspects including hospitality career, training, satisfaction, intention, legal and compliance, gender differentiation, work environment, personal development, performance evaluation. Most recently, scholars have suggested HRM practices, turnover intention or behavior, employee and customer satisfaction, conflict, flexible working, well-being, and firm performance have been the dominant aspects of past research [35]. Herbie, Illés, Dunay, and Khalife, 2021 [36] conducted a bibliometric analysis of the tourism and hospitality sector’s HRM based on publications from 1977 to 2020. Through analysis, they identified “citizenship behavior and migration workers” as the latest engaging topics. Wang, Dagvadorj and Kim, 2021 [37] brought forward trends of hospitality HRM research through a sample of Korean Citation Index (KCI) publications. In terms of the seven topics, hospitality jobs, relationships, and performance, customers, and services account for the highest ratio.

The existing research mainly reveals the influence of the pandemic on the global economy and workforce market. Moreover, it begins to dig into the movements and creativeness of the HR field with different industries in the post-pandemic contexts. To limit the challenges in the hospitality industry, the HRM department must quickly respond to this new environment.

2.3. Grounded Theory and NVivo

This study explored the qualitative content analysis method. Content analysis is an in-depth, systematic analysis of a phenomenon lacking theoretical knowledge of the relevant materials, material coding, classification, aggregation, statistics, and ultimately the formation of specific knowledge of flexible research methods [38]. Braun and Clarke, 2006 [15] mentioned the momentum of widespread adoption of grounded theory when the thematic analysis is required. An operation process consists of reading the description material of a phenomenon lacking theory verbatim, encoding the description material, clustering the coding based on the similarity, affiliation, and related relationship between the coding, and then using the coding to measure the material, and then summarizing the knowledge of that phenomenon. It is suitable for in-depth analysis and systematic induction of text materials and has significant advantages in describing the main features of a phenomenon for expanding and enriching existing theoretical knowledge.

Grounded theory [39] is widely used in many social science fields, which emphasizes the systematic collection and analysis of empirical facts and the theory of sampling based on empirical facts. According to grounded theory, boundary questions, data search and collection, data analysis and coding, and theoretical model construction are four steps for processing. This paper strictly followed the steps. First, to clarify the research process, this study recognized the need to understand the main question: what is the current research status of hospitality HRM under the COVID-19 crisis? What factors in the context influence the antecedents-HRM-performances mechanism?

Next, NVivo 12.0 software was developed by QSR as an analysis tool for coding data and organizing nodes for qualitative research, which is certified as a package approach to implementing grounded theory [40]. It is relevant to recognize that NVivo can display grounded theory in multiple facets, even the final step of showing the explanatory model accompanied by a depth of understanding [40,41]. Many scholars conducted research and contributed to hospitality-related issues with the aid of NVivo [42,43,44]. NVivo makes it possible to import and analyze rich amounts, large sizes, and different types of qualitative data [41]. The process in NVivo includes developing a project, importing documents, coding the node, and conceptualizing the attributes. Entangled in this process, scholars could link the different groups of the data, create and collate the node structure, and visualize and model the data [41].

3. Methodology

3.1. Software Selection

Scholars emphasized the need to choose effective tools for qualitative research from a wide range of technologies [45]. Figure 1 outlines the research approach and each selected software. To put this in order, this study incorporated the Web of Science (WoS) database, allowing advanced searches and export of the file, which included an overview of the paper, title, abstract, and keywords [45]. In order to ensure that the report’s accuracy and reliability, this study imported PRISMA 2020 [14] and followed its guidance to modify or remove the data. PRISMA flow can be used as the basis of reporting systematic reviews, which benefits in providing a clear and complete process, thereby facilitating reliability [14].

Figure 1. Outlined a step-by-step research design.

Once the review and citation reports are conducted, VOSview free software [46] creates maps based on text corpus co-occurrence matrix. VOSview is widely implemented because of its high-quality visualization and powerful big data processing capabilities [45,46]. The next step involves data organizing, a three-step coding method, and refining the topic, and NVivo 12.0 was applied at this stage. NVivo is user-friendly, and the internal operating structure is very flexible [41,45]. First, open coding was conducted to break down data into units and determine and mark cluster concepts [39,47]. The second step in the coding process is to use the axial coding function to classify important nodes and data into outlines [39,47]. The third coding step is to associate related topics (or themes) and subtopics (or subthemes) through selective coding [39,47]. Overall, this study followed the conceptual logic of grounded theory [39,47] and, based on the theoretical model of the strategic role of HRM for organizations [31,32] conducted the analysis.

3.2. Procedure

To extract papers that relate to hospitality HRM, “hospitality”, “employee”, “COVID-19”, and “human resource” were entered as the keywords in the WoS database. This study developed a selection strategy for reporting systematic reviews based on the PRISMA flow chart mode [14]. As shown in Figure 2, three consecutive steps, including identification, screening, and inclusion, were procedures. The search result returned 96 articles and 46 related sources (retrieved on 10 November 2021). Then these publications are thoroughly screened. As part of this, we first checked the research area of the sample. Less relevant research areas (such as computer science) were excluded. To further ensure the validity of the data, the title, abstract, and keywords of each publication were analyzed [48]. Finally, publications are discarded because of non-English writing (n = 7), unable to download original text (n = 26), invalidity (n = 4), non-research paper (n = 3), and 40 articles are excluded. The final 102 publications sample is listed in Table A1 in Appendix A.

Figure 2. PRISMA flow diagram for selection strategy.

4. Results

4.1. Overview of Publications

Figure 3 displays the publication and citation report between the years 2020 and 2021. Overall, 102 articles with the topic COVID-19 and hospitality HRM were examined in this study. 84 articles (82.3%) were published in 2021. The citation rate ballooned to almost 17 times from 2020 to 2021. Specifically, the highest cited paper (total citation = 156) is the paper “COVID-19’s impact on the hospitality workforce—new crisis or amplification of the norm?” conducted by Baum, Mooney, Robinson, and Solnet, 2020 [49]. It can be observed that the growth of academic interests, also reflected the urgent research necessity from the side.

Figure 3. Time cited and publications over time.

Table 1 lists the research areas of publications. The top 10 research areas are concentrated on hospitality leisure sport tourism, management, environment science, green sustainable science technology, environmental studies, business, public environmental occupational health, economics, business finance, sociology, and area studies.

Table 1. Top 10 research areas of publications.

Field: Research Areas	Record Count	% of 102
Hospitality Leisure Sport Tourism	64	62.745
Management	24	23.529
Environmental Science	10	9.804
Green Sustainable Science Technology	8	7.843
Environmental Studies	7	6.863
Business	6	5.992
Public Environment Occupational Health	5	4.902
Economics	3	2.941
Business Finance	2	1.961
Sociology	2	1.961
Area Studies	1	0.980

4.2. Keywords and Co-Occurrence Analysis

In order to extract accurate keywords, this study only uses the title, keywords, and abstracts for word frequency analysis. Table A2 (Appendix B) listed the top 100 words. “employee” (433 count, 2.02% weighted), “covid” (310 count, 1.44% weighted), “hotel” (239 count, 1.11% weighted) and “hospitality” (235 count, 1.09% weighted), “working” (207 count, 0.96% weighted) appeared. There are also some keywords shown exciting clues, such as “health” (207 count, 0.96% weighted), “employed” (120 count, 0.56% weighted), “mental” (78 count, 0.36% weighted). “responsibility” (74 count, 0.34% weighted), “customer” (64 count, 0.30% weighted), “resilience” (61 count, 0.28% weighted), “safety” (57 count, 0.27% weighted), “insecurity” (57 count, 0.27% weighted), “stress” (57 count, 0.27% weighted), “home” (56 count, 0.26% weighted), “change” (50 count, 0.23% weighted), and “risk” (50 count, 0.23% weighted). Figure 4 shows the top 100 frequency words cloud.

Figure 4. Word cloud 100.

This study utilized the visualization tool VOSviewer to produce Keyword co-occurrence analysis [46]. Figure 5 visualizes the keywords co-occurrence map. The red cluster and green cluster are in the center of the network, which also shows that the theme frequently appeared recently. These themes can be considered as consequences of employees in the hospitality and the COVID-19 contexts, such as turnover intention, layoff, and emotional challenge. The yellow cluster consists of terms related to the hospitality field organizational performance with COVID-19. In addition, the blue cluster includes terms that marginal and edge themes, such as research methodology and demographic characteristics.

Figure 5. Keywords co-occurrence map.

4.3. Coding Process

After preliminary data processing and analysis, this study adopted the qualitative data analysis method generally advocated by scholars based on the NVivo technique [15,41]. First, after running open code, this study totally obtained 309 nodes (see Figure 6).

Figure 6. 309 free codes cluster map.

The secondary code is a further induction and integration based on the 309 nodes. This study obtained 26 secondary nodes “behaviors”, “career”, “crisis”, “effect”, “employee”, “health”, “hospitality”, “hotel”, “industry”, “intention”, “job”, “job insecurity”, “leaders”, “levels”, “management”, “marketing”, “mediating”, “moderating”, “productivity”, “research”, “resilience”, “risk”, “role”, “safety”, “service”, “social responsibility”, “strategies”, “study”, “support”, “theory”, “tourism”, “training”, “turnover intention”. Based on these secondary codes, the top 10 clusters represent the relationship between the COVID-19 and the hospitality industry, while the pandemic is closely linked to hotel employees (see Figure 7).

Figure 7. Top 10 clusters.

While open coding leads to searching for themes [15,41], the process of reviewing themes should include re-coding the nodes. This study reorganized the 309 free codes and 26 secondary codes into seven major categories, or themes, namely, “industrial factor”, “environmental factor”, “employee”, “organization”, “external outcomes”, “HRM practice”, and “methodology”. Figure 8 presents the nodes structures. The center is the purpose of the paper, that is, the research of hospitality HRM and the specific hierarchy of hospitality HRM research in the background of the COVID-19 pandemic is expressed in a multi-layered ring. The internal nodes of each layer of the ring are divided into dimensions that reflect the dimensions or categories of hospitality HRM research with COVID-19.

Figure 8. Nodes’ structure.

From the structures of the nodes, it can be seen that the influencing variables of hospitality HRM and COVID-19 are comprised of seven main themes and 26 secondary nodes. The vertical structure of the circle in each sector area reflects the hierarchical relationship of the specific variables of the hospitality HRM research in the context of COVID-19, due to a large number of tertiary nodes, only the themes and the secondary nodes obtained by NVivo [15] encoding are listed in this figure. Accordingly, the size of the sectoral area of each layer is determined by the number of reference points in the code, which represent the number of documents supporting each node, reflecting the influence of a particular factor on all the influencing elements of this layer. Among seven main themes, the “industrial factor” and “organization” account for the most references, reflect the most attention and influence. The order that follows is “employee” and “environmental factors”. It also illustrates from the side that the hospitality industry is a labor-centered industry. A surprising finding is the presence of “methodology” nodes. Scholars tested the different concept of “theory”, multiple “levels”, and the various of “model” around the topic of hospitality HRM and COVID-19. However, the slightly regrettable finding is that there is not much research on the “external outcomes”, as the quality of “service”, “consumption”, and “customer satisfaction”. Perhaps because of the COVID-19 pandemic, studies that observe or investigate such substantive manifestations and performances could not be conducted.

4.4. Conceptual Network

The grounded theory advises scholars to exercise concepts and develop a theoretical model construction [15,39]. In doing so, the final step of analysis is developing a theoretical model construction [15,39]. This study attempted to investigate factors relationships by applying the seven separate themes to the conceptual strategic HRM role model [31,32] and Input-Process-Output (IPO) mechanism. Table 2, Table 3, Table 4, Table 5, Table 6, Table 7 and Table 8 presents the detailed description of themes and factors, which blends discovered themes and factors into existing concepts, thus integrating them into a more formidable theoretical framework.

Table 2. Nodes for “environmental factors”.

Theme: Environmental	Node Count	Example Nodes (Numb. of Points)
Environmental factors	40
COVID-19	25	crisis management (1) crisis preparedness (1) crisis responses (1) extraordinary crisis situation (1) global crisis (2) global health crisis (10) pandemic crisis (10)
Health	9	health crisis (1) additional health (1) health complaints (1) health risk (4) mental health problems (2)
Risk	6	risk perception (1) health risk (2) home risks (1) risk reduction strategies (1) various risks (1)

Table 3. Nodes for “industrial factors”.

Theme: Industrial	Node Count	Example Nodes (Numb. of Points)
Industrial factors	59
Tourism	10	domestic tourism (1) food tourism (1) fragile tourism (1) tourism industry (3) tourism organizations (2) tourism sector (1) tourism workforce (1)
Area	5	Canadian lodging industry (1) Indian hospitality industry (1) Taiwanese tourism (1) Chinese hospitality industry (1) Egypt (1)
Hotel	18	boutique hotel (1) chain-managed five-star hotels (5) hotel industry (8) Lebanese hotels (1) multinational hotel corporation experience (1) robot-staffed hotels (1) rural hotels (1) subsidiary hotel properties (1)
Hospitality	25	hospitality industry (12) hospitality sectors (5) hospitality context (2) industry revival (1) large-scale industry transformation (1) private equity industry (1) service industries (1) multinational hospitality companies (2)
Marketing	10	stock markets (1) changing marketing channels (2) competitive market (1) hospitality services marketing structure (4) market adjustment (1) transformative marketing structure (1)

Table 4. Nodes for “HRM practice”.

Theme: HRM Practice	Node Count	Example Nodes (Numb. of Points)
HRM practice	41
Training	11	certificate training (1) employee training (1) crisis awareness training (1) confidence-building training (2) contemporary training (1) innovative training (1) talent cultivation training (3) safety coaching (1)
Support	12	community support (2) income support (2) personal support networks (1) psychological support services (1) religious support (1) social support (2) supervisor support (3)
Management	16	crisis management (4) human resource management (11) impression management tactics (1) management safety practices (1)
Leadership	2	leader conscientiousness (1) hotel safety leadership (1)

Table 5. Nodes for “influence on employee”.

Theme: Employee	Node Count	Example Nodes (Numb. of Points)
Employee level	54
Behavior	26	employee withdrawal behavior (3) human behavior (1) instilling servant behaviors (1) prompting safety behaviors (1) risk-taking behavior (2) safety performance behaviors (2) work behavior (1) career adaptability (7) employee productivity (5) employee empowerment (2) employee entitlements (1)
Psychology	28	aggregation (1) career change intention (4) turnover intention (10) employee anxiety (1) employee fears (3) employee focus (1) employee loyalty (4) employee wellbeing (2) psychological resilience (1) psychological support services (1)

Table 6. Nodes for “influence on organization”.

Theme: Organization	Node Count	Example Nodes (Numb. of Points)
Organizational level	59
Job	30	building job satisfaction (2) job shadows (2) job creation (1) job destruction rates (1) job insecurity (9) job loss (9) job motivation (4) job performance (1) prevented job destruction (1)
Strategies	10	organizational crisis strategies (2) branding strategies (2) corporate narrative strategies (1) different information search strategies (1) innovative strategies (1) recovery strategy development (1) risk reduction strategies (2)
Resilience	9	resilience factors (3) organizational resilience (4) resilience action (2)
Safety	4	organizational safety climate (2) safety procedures (1) safety regulations (1)
CSR	1	social responsibility (1)
Productivity	5	pre-pandemic productivity trend (1) productivity collapse (1) productivity dynamics (2) productivity growth (1)

Table 7. Nodes for “influence on service, customer, technology”.

Theme: Outcomes	Node Count	Example Nodes (Numb. of Points)
Service, customer, technology	18
Service	14	corporate service departments (4) essential service workers (2) personal services sectors (4)
Customer	3	re-visit intention (2) consumption behaviors (1)
Technology	1	service robots (1)

Table 8. Nodes for “methodology”.

Theme: Methodology	Node Count	Example Nodes (Numb. of Points)
Research methodology	34
Model	16	mediating mechanism (6) moderating mechanism (8) gender moderates (1) double mediators (1) chaos theory perspective (1) event system theories (1) expectancy-valence theory (1) impression management theory (1) learning theories (1)
Theory	12	occupational stigma theory (1) proxemics theory (1) resource allocation theories (1) self-categorization theory (1) social exchange theory (1) stakeholder theory (1) transactional theory (1)
Level	6	depression levels (1) increasing levels (1) individual level (1) industry level (1) social interaction levels (1) team level (1)

4.4.1. Theme 1: Input: Environmental Factors

The first theme is “environmental factors”. Scholars have executed many studies to illustrate how and why environmental factors may influence HRM practice so strongly [31,50,51]. In this study, environmental factors mainly refer to the COVID-19 crisis, which is an antecedent that affects the challenge of hospitality HRM. Scholars described how COVID-19 has shocked the hospitality industry. At the same time, it was also concerned with “health” and “risk”.

4.4.2. Theme 2: Input: Industrial Factors

Industry and sector characteristics affect HRM activities in different ways [31,51]. “tourism”, “hotel”, “hospitality”, and “marketing” have been identified. It is noteworthy that “robot-staffed hotels” began to surface and be seen as a remarkable current issue for the hospitality industry [52]. Bowen and Morosan, 2018 [52] provided their view of artificial intelligence (AI) in the hospitality industry and proposed its usage will be effective by the 2030s. Due to COVID-19, the age of AI and robotics in hospitality is coming sooner than expected. The two sides of AI and robotics, including positive and negative influences, are discussed [53,54,55,56].

4.4.3. Theme 3: Progress: HRM Practice

It is reasonable to assume that the COVID-19 crisis has triggered the issue related to the rethinking and recrafting of HRM strategies and practices in the hospitality sector. Compared to other topics and themes, it is obvious that scholars have paid limited attention to HRM practice. “Training”, “support”, “management”, and “leadership” are most frequently explored by scholars. For leadership, only “hotel safety leadership” [57] has appeared in multigroup experimental analysis. There is a need for leaders to refine their perspectives on managing employees from a new angle.

4.4.4. Theme 4: Outcome: Influence on the Employee

Scholars believed employees are the foundations of HRM, what is more worthy of mention is that the pandemic has brought people-oriented back to the focal point [9]. “Foodservice employees”, “hospitality employees”, and “service employees” are the group of people who are concerned and pointed out. Various variables have been investigated as employee performance.

For example, some scholars explored employees’ “mental health” and “mental problems” under the COVID-19 crisis [58,59]. Employee’s work attitude and “turnover intention” [60,61,62], career adaptive [63], perspective on career prospect [64,65], risk perspective, well-being, anxiety, and stress [66,67]. It is not surprising how COVID-19 negatively affects hospitality employee work performance; scholars have tried to explore and explain the black box of how the COVID-19 crisis has affected hospitality staff through theoretical mechanisms.

4.4.5. Theme 5: Outcome: Influence on the Organization

“Organization” is a theme with a high proportion of weight, indicating that there are more nodes under this theme, and scholars’ research attention and research outcomes are heightened. The challenge of coping with COVID-19 underlines the need for the organizations to revive their fading business dynamism. “job”, “strategies”, “resilience”, “safety”, “CSR”, and “productivity” are the highlighted issues.

4.4.6. Theme 6: External Outcome: Service, Customer, Technology

Compared with influences on employee level and organizational level, “external outcomes” related to the external performance, factors such as “service”, “customer”, and “technology” are emphasized. The effectiveness of hospitality HRM is not only embodied in internal management and organizational performance but how to provide quality services to customers is also part of the responsibility [32].

4.4.7. Theme 7: Methodology

In the last theme, “Methodology”, by way of example, “model” node was drawn with different mechanisms, whereas “theory” is seen as the theoretical background and logic support, with multiple perspectives of “level” research encapsulated in this theme.

5. Agenda for Hospitality HRM

The COVID-19 pandemic has seriously affected the political and economic development pattern in the world. It has profoundly changed the hospitality industry and human resource service mode of hospitality HRM. The normalization of pandemic prevention and control has brought revolutionary challenges to employees and employers. Through an in-depth analysis of the text of research on hospitality HRM during the pandemic period, this study offers the agenda faced by the development of research on hospitality HRM in the post-pandemic era.

The first issue is employee mental health. With the central concern of employees’ positive behavior and psychological health, the hospitality industry should be concerned about employee anxiety, stress, nervousness, and negative turnover intention. Psychological assistance, training programs can be provided appropriately. Furthermore, strengthening leadership services and fostering an internal organizational environment for win-win cooperation are also vital.

The second issue relates to the working environment safety. To cope with the pandemic prevention and control crisis, it is time for business associations to establish comprehensive cleaning and safety standards for enterprises. Furthermore, to achieve a work environment in the negative pandemic situation, HRM for the hospitality sector must be rigorous and flexible. Employees in the hospitality sector are close interaction with guests, making them work at risk in the context of the pandemic. HRM should offer strict workflow and standard checklists to guarantee employees security. Furthermore, employees’ intentions, such as risk perception, are in the chain of the work environment. The need to increase HRM flexibility in hospitality industry to promote workplace safety is more urgent than ever today.

The third issue involves the disruptive HRM practice. On the one hand, hospitality HRM is facing major development opportunities. Adapting to the changes in the human resource market and the needs of human resource services, disruptive and innovative HR practices are the outlet for problem-solving, which has triggered creative thinking about the HRM perspective. Based on the finding, this study suggests hospitality HRM (1) applying PopTech such as social media, big data, AI, and robotics, speeding up the digital transformation of human resource services, (2) organizational reconstruction and business model reconstruction, (3) enhancing the internationalization of human resource services, and (4) deepening the dialogue between stakeholders including industry, social, and government. These strategies will bring unlimited development space for the develop the hospitality human resource services industry.

The post-pandemic era has arrived, the fourth focus is on recovery and transition. As the hospitality industry develops and recovers in the post-pandemic era, it is crucial to concentrate on the particular problems faced by the transformation and development of market segments and specific HR practices in the background of hospitality and to provide theory and strategic support to HR departments at different levels and types of development planning. Back to our findings, resilience is the main key access point to enhance the organization’s capacity to recover.

Furthermore, from the perspective of different parties such as employees, organizations, HRMs, and customers, conducting forward-looking theoretical discussions are required to provide service support for the hospitality industry to seize a new round of significant industry development opportunities to achieve leapfrog development. Additionally, regional and area hospitality HRM case studies can summarize actions and strategies that can be taken in times of disaster.

6. Conclusions

Given these efforts, the current study fulfilled the hospitality HRM field in several approaches. First, 102 publications were extracted with the specified keywords and analyzed with VOSview [46] and NVivo [15]. By assessing the current issue of COVID-19 and scientific knowledge of hospitality HRM, this study summarized the research state-of-art in this field. After reviewing to identify the top keywords, nodes, and seven themes, this study proposed a research agenda. Second, regarding to how factors and themes affect employee performance and service quality, this study proposes different interrelationships occurring at different progress of HR systems in predictable patterns by establishing a theoretical framework. From the perspective on the content of the theme dimension of hospitality HRM, antecedents such as environmental factors (e.g., COVID-19) and industry characteristics (e.g., particular sectors) affect the transformation of HRM practices. Through the progress, the antecedent factors have an impact on the organizational level (influence on organizations) and individual level (influence on the employee) performance through various HRM practices. Moreover, service, customers, and new techniques are transferred externally. HRM departments have the role in turning a crisis into an opportunity if only they can minimize the negative impact on employees and organizations by grasping the situation absolutely, responding and acting quickly, adjusting, and making the right decision.

In conclusion, the findings of this study shed light on the hospitality HRM research. Under the pandemic situation, the achievements of hospitality HRM research are fruitful. However, many areas are worthy of deliberation, such as HRM practice innovation and external outcomes (such as themes 6, service, customer, and technologies application). Combined with the environmental background and industrial characteristics, the new opportunities for the development of hospitality HRM in the post-pandemic era are more significant than the new challenges. That is, how HRM can navigate the hospitality in a complexity crisis context to achieve sustainable development and stable services output is the subject of research.

Nonetheless, certain limitations should be addressed. First, this study inevitably neglects to compare trends before and after the pandemic. For comparison, scholars usually labeled several phases for the pandemic [3] or mapped the timeline [10] for comparing the evolving. In order to overcome this limitation, it is proposed to increase collection time, add resources, and use mixed approaches to analyze the data. Second, this study is short on empirical data supporting. Therefore, the proposed research agenda should be carried out with a quantitative study. Additionally, future studies can be conducted precisely with other samples. This study utilized WoS databases, future study is encouraged to utilize multiple sample sets for a more comprehensive explanation.