How pet companionship lightens chronic burnout in young migrant hotel workers: A social constructionist inquiry

Young migrant entry-level employees in the hotel industry often experience chronic job burnout. This is largely attributed to the high job demands and low job resources inherent in their work environment, compounded by factors like being away from home and facing difficulties integrating into local communities. Consequently, the hotel industry grapples with high turnover rates and low job satisfaction among its entry-level workforce. Drawing on a social constructionist paradigm and grounded in the Job Demands-Resources model and Home Away from Home theory, this study systematically investigates the modes and significance of human-animal interaction among young migrant entry-level employees across multiple high-star hotels. The findings suggest that: (1) Human-animal interaction facilitates the construction of a daily leisure space for these employees, encompassing both a sense of home and a space for daily social interaction, effectively mitigating work-leisure conflict. (2) Within the home space, human-animal interaction fosters feelings of companionship and being needed, disrupting the loss cycle inherent in chronic job burnout. (3) In the daily social space, human-animal interaction contributes to the formation of subcultural groups, providing individuals with daily work support and opportunities for skill enhancement. This effectively transforms interpersonal resources into job resources, counteracting the resource depletion spiral associated with chronic job burnout. (4) Mediated representations of pets contribute to both emotional connections within the daily leisure space and subcultural group cohesion within the work space, serving as a crucial link between these two domains.