An Exploration of Highly Skilled Immigrant Employees’ Competencies and Their Perceived Value Among Human Resource Professionals in the Hotel Industry: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

This dissertation examines how highly skilled immigrant employees (HSIEs) in U.S. hotels validate and mobilize migration-linked cultural and linguistic capital, and how hotel human resources (HR) professionals perceive, recognize, and integrate those competencies into people-management practices. Guided by Cultural Capital Theory and complemented by Human Capital and Endogenous Growth perspectives, the study used an interpretivist qualitative design. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2024–2025 with 18 participants working in U.S. hotels spanning metropolitan, mid-sized, and smaller cities (8 HSIEs; 10 HR professionals). Interview transcripts were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis to construct patterned meanings within and across the HSIE and HR datasets. Findings show that HSIEs validate cultural capital through concrete, guest-facing, and coordination behaviors, particularly multilingual service recovery, culturally attuned communication, and the transfer of luxury-level service standards across contexts. HSIEs also described career adjustments, including role changes and employer moves, as strategies to invest their competencies where training, recognition, and advancement pathways are clearer. From the HR perspective, HSIE value was commonly recognized through reliability and work ethic alongside intercultural and language-mediated problem solving; however, participants described limited formal mechanisms to consistently credit such intercultural work in evaluations, incentives, and promotion decisions. HR practices that supported stronger utilization included structured onboarding, mentoring and coaching plans, cross-training, support, and inclusive leadership routines that make competencies visible. The dissertation contributes to hospitality and migration scholarship by clarifying how cultural and linguistic resources become organizational value through recognition processes and offers practice implications for designing HR systems that systematically capture, reward, and develop HSIE competencies to strengthen service quality, retention, and long-term organizational capability.