A research study submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Administration, School of Management

Research report (M.Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2004

In this global era, all organizations today strive to achieve the improvement of their perf01mance while increasing the participation of employees by improving their competency. To achieve the target of the organization and enhance the performance of its workforce, effective human resource management policies and practices play the critical role in all industries. Performance management, the key factor of the human resource management practices is recognized as a necessity in order to improve the performance of the individual employee and lead to the high organizational performance as well. As a result, it could be expected that every organizations and companies need to practice the effective performance management practices in order to improve the competency of their employees. Staiting from 1988 while Myanmar Government started to practice the market-oriented economy, Hotel and Tourism industry is the key foreign exchange earner in Myanmar. As service quality plays the vital issue in the development of this industry, the hotels operating in Myanmar need to focus on this key success factor and try to improve the competency of their service employees. Even though the operating hotels pay attention to the competency improvement of their employees, they are still lacking well-established HR policies and practices including perf01mance management processes. This research, therefore, tries to evaluate the effectiveness of current human resource management practices on the performance of the employees and the hotel as well by investigating their human resource management processes, the attitudes of the General managers and employees on these issues. The results of this survey conducted in two service apartment hotels of Yangon, Myanmar, highlighted that there is a long way ahead to practice the effective performance management systems for the improvement of their employees' performance. For the time being, they try to perform in their own ways, which are relevant and appropriate to their current situations. Thus, in the final pait of this research, proposed human resource practices for providing the platform to build an effective human resource policy that will enhance the performance of their employees resulting the improvement of the organizational performance.