On the morning of November 18, 2024, the Tourism, Hospitality and Event Management Programme of the Department of Cultural Creativity and Design, School of Culture and Creativity, had the honor of hosting Dr. Crystal Shi, an Assistant Professor from the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Dr. Shi presented an academic seminar titled "Modeling Time in Hospitality Organizational Research: Understanding Dynamic Processes Over Time" to an engaged audience of faculty and students in room CC302.

Dr. Shi, with her extensive research experience in the field of hotel and tourism management, demonstrated to the faculty and students present how time modeling can be employed to capture and comprehend the complex dynamics within organizational behavior and human resource management. She elaborated on the role of time in organizational research, highlighting key issues that arise from overlooking temporal dynamics in current studies. Dr. Shi also emphasized the advantages of the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) in capturing within-person trends and demonstrated how this approach can be used to track the trajectories of key variables.

Furthermore, Dr. Shi analyzed the ways in which the characteristics of the hospitality industry's work impact various employee issues, including how factors such as high labor intensity, Irregular and non-standard working hours, constant interpersonal engagements, and emotional dissonance affect the dynamic within-person changes in turnover intention, job autonomy, insomnia, and ego depletion. Lastly, Dr. Shi proposed future research directions, including focusing on the impact of surface and deep-level similarities/dissimilarities in mentor–protégé relationships over time on mentoring outcomes, as well as how to advance the development of women in Hong Kong's hospitality industry.

Dr. Crystal Shi's presentation at this seminar not only provided valuable academic resources for UIC's faculty and students, but also introduced undergraduates to the Master of Sciences programmes offered by School of Hotel and Tourism Managmenet at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, along with key course offerings, research initiatives, and career development opportunities. Dr. Crystal Shi's profound insights and research outcomes will undoubtedly have a positive impact on the teaching and research of the Tourism, Hospitality, and Event Management Programme.

Dr. Crystal Shi obtained her master’s degree and Ph.D. degree at Purdue University, USA. She has held management positions at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in Seattle, USA, and the Fairmont Peace Hotel in Shanghai, China. She advocates for the integration of classroom knowledge with practical industry experience and focuses on researching organizational behavior and human resource management in the hotel industry. Dr. Shi’s research has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Tourism Management, International Journal of Hospitality Management, and Frontiers in Psychology.

Text: Weilu WANG

Photos: Hannah Xiaonan ZHANG, Danting CAI