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This chapter sets out to analyze the impact of the Covid-19 virus on the holidays provided by UK group tour operators (GTOs) and the implications for overtourism. With tourism arrivals expected to fall by up to 30% in 2020 and a slow return to pre-Covid-19 levels for 2021 and beyond, the industry is possibly suffering the loss of up to 100 million travel-related jobs (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2020). GTOs will need to assess and possibly change the way they do business to initially survive and subsequently build up tourism numbers in the coming years.

This chapter identifies how GTOs could alter their holiday proposition to reassure travellers including the challenges of operating international tours when airlines have reduced capacity, the need to consider alternative age demographics who are more likely to travel and assessing existing itineraries to visit rural or small town locations rather than cities where numerous itineraries travel to now.

Finally, this chapter discusses and describes the significance of the findings with insights about possible opportunities based upon the approaches taken by various countries to target potential holidaymakers and the need to create a ‘crisis management plan’ for current and future countries. This may result in operational adjustments to meet these new requirements including the changing outlook of potential customers and the possibility of offering domestic tours to meet the current demand.

Fun means different things to different people and the purpose of this paper is to attempt to answer the question “what is fun at work?”. Given that perceptions of fun differ among people, the answer is that a pluralistic concept of fun best captures different notions of what constitutes fun at work.

The research combines two separate studies. The first is an in-depth ethnographic project involving interviews, participant observations and document collection investigating fun and humour in four different New Zealand companies. The second study extends findings from the first by specifically asking participants to reply to survey questions asking “what is fun at work?”.

Currently fun is described in a variety of ways by researchers using different descriptors for similar concepts. Combining current conceptions of fun with the own research the authors categorize the complex notion of workplace fun into three clear categories: organic, managed and task fun. This tripartite conception of fun combines and extends current models of fun and collates earlier findings into a synthesized model of fun. The investigation found that fun is ambiguous and paradoxical which creates issues for both managers and employees. The authors recognize fun as a multifaceted concept and use paradox theory and the concept of flow to theorize the multilateral fun framework.

The authors find significant implications for managers in regards to creating and fostering fun in the organizational context. Differing perceptions of fun may result in misunderstandings that can negatively impact morale and workplace relationships. A wider conceptualization of fun offers potential for more harmonious and productive workplaces and creates a greater tolerance for competing and paradoxical perceptions of fun.

Current literature on workplace fun uses a variety of descriptors of fun and emphasizes a duality between managed and organic forms of fun. In suggesting a new term “task fun” the authors synthesize earlier conceptions of fun to create an integrated model of fun. The model clearly outlines three overlapping yet paradoxical categories of fun.

This purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between workplace fun, trust-in-management, employee satisfaction and whether the level of fun experienced at work moderates the effects.

Data were collected from a sample of 240 frontline staff in a large-scale retail store in Hong Kong.

The results show that trust-in-management mediates the relationship between workplace fun and employee job satisfaction. Additionally, employees who experience a high level of fun in the workplace have a greater effect on workplace fun, trust-in-management and job satisfaction.

The main limitation of this study is that it collects data from a self-reported single source in a cross-sectional survey design.

Because workplace fun helps organizations promote employee trust and job satisfaction, organizations should provide more enjoyable activities for employees to participate in.

This study provides a new insight into the effects of workplace fun on employees’ trust-in-management and job satisfaction.

The aim of this study is to reveal how Generation Y employees' attitude toward workplace fun affects their experienced workplace fun, job satisfaction, task performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors toward individuals (OCBI) in the hospitality business context.

The conceptual model of this study was tested based on responses from 234 hospitality students in the USA who are Generation Yers and had worked in the hospitality industry for more than three months.

This study revealed that Generation Y employees' attitude toward workplace fun positively affects their experienced workplace fun. In turn, Generation Yers' experienced workplace fun showed positive direct effects on their job satisfaction, task performance, and OCBI.

First, the older Gen. Yers who are 26 or older were underrepresented in this study. Also, Gen. Yers who are less than college educated are not included in this study. Second, a nation‐wide economic crisis in the USA may affect college students' attitude toward workplace fun, making them more serious about work.

The management in hospitality businesses needs to foster fun‐loving cultures to get rid of any unnecessary guilt feeling of having fun at work among employees, and thus fully enjoy the positive effects of workplace fun in the organization.

This study is the first to empirically test how hospitality employees' attitude toward workplace fun affects their job performance.

The purpose of this paper is to extend research on fun in the workplace by focussing on its relationship with job embeddedness among Millennials. This research examined the influence of four dimensions of fun, including fun activities, manager support for fun, coworker socializing, and fun job responsibilities, on embeddedness. In addition, this research assessed the impact of fun relative to other aspects of the employment experience.

Data were obtained from 234 full-time working Millennials via survey methodology.

Fun job responsibilities were the most dominant predictor of embeddedness followed by perceived career opportunities and praise and rewards. The other dimensions of fun accounted for significant variance in embeddedness, yet their influence was more modest.

The research demonstrated that fun plays a role in enhancing Millennials’ embeddedness, accounting for significant additional variance beyond other important aspects of the employment experience. At the same time, some aspects of fun were more dominant predictors of embeddedness than others, and other aspects of the employment experience were more dominant predictors than certain aspects of fun. These findings should be interpreted in the context of the primary limitation that the data were cross-sectional.

Workplace fun may play a role in enhancing embeddedness, but organizations should not lose sight of other human resource management practices.

The present study examined the role of workplace fun in a more nuanced perspective by examining its relationship on embeddedness relative to other important constructs.

Despite previous research indicating that fun in the workplace has favorable outcomes, the effect of fun on turnover has not been definitively determined. The present study analyzed the direct effects on turnover of three dimensions of fun: fun activities, coworker socializing and manager support for fun, and the moderating influence of managed fun (e.g. whether fun is perceived as contrived).

Logistic regression was used to analyze the fun in the workplace-turnover relationship with a sample of 491 hourly associates from 141 stores of a US national retailer. Data on the fun were obtained through surveys that were paired with turnover data collected six months afterward from corporate records.

Fun activities were only found to be associated with a lower turnover when employees perceived fun as less managed. When employees perceived fun as more managed, fun activities had no effect on turnover. Coworker socializing was associated with a lower turnover when fun was perceived as less managed and higher turnover when fun was perceived as more managed.

As the data were obtained from employees from one organization, further research would be valuable with additional samples to substantiate the generalizability of the results.

Given the challenge of turnover and the increasing prevalence of efforts to promote fun in the workplace, organizations should allow fun activities to be less managed (and thus more organic) to help reduce turnover.

While previous research has addressed managed/less managed fun in qualitative research, the present study represents the first investigation to examine this aspect of fun in the workplace from a quantitative perspective and to examine its relationship with employee turnover.

The idea of workplace fun seems positive, straightforward and simple but emerging research suggests a surprising complexity and ambiguity to this concept. Drawing on recent literature and empirical data, the purpose of this paper is to use three different forms of workplace fun: managed, organic and task fun to examine the relationship between fun and workplace engagement.

Using an ethnographic approach, the qualitative data originated from four different New Zealand organizations, within different industries. Organizations included a law firm, a financial institution, an information technology company and a utility services provider. Data for this study were collected from semi-structured interviews with a range of participants in each company. In total 59 interviews were conducted with approximately 15 originating from each of the four organizations. One full-time month was spent within each company experiencing the everyday life and behaviours at all levels of each organization. The specific focus of the research is organizational culture and humour and during analysis findings emerged that linked to engagement, fun, disengagement and the concept of flow.

This paper offers exploratory findings that suggest some specific connections between the concepts of fun and engagement. Empirical connections between these concepts are not currently apparent in either engagement or fun research, yet the data suggest some firm associations between them. The exploratory findings suggest that some forms of workplace fun offer individual employees a refreshing break which creates positive affect. Participants perceive that such affect results in greater workplace and task engagement. Additionally the data show that some people experience their work tasks as a form of fun and the authors link this to a specific form of engagement known as “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975; Moneta, 2010). The authors suggest an organizational-level effect, where workplace fun creates enjoyment which stimulates greater overall engagement with the team, unit or organization itself. Conversely the data also suggest that for some people managed or organic fun (see Plester et al., 2015) creates distraction, disharmony or dissonance that disrupts their flow and can foster disengagement.

The ambiguity and complexity in the relationship between these concepts is an emerging topic for research that offers a variety of implications for scholars and practitioners of HRM and organizational behaviour. The authors contend that workplace fun potentially offers practitioners opportunities for fostering a climate of high engagement which may include most employees and thus create additional workplace benefits. Additionally through highlighting employee reactions to different types of fun we suggest ways of avoiding employee disengagement, disharmony and cynicism and the associated negative effects.

The concept of fun is not empirically linked with current engagement research and the authors assert that workplace fun is an important driver of employee engagement. The authors identity engagement at the individual task level and further extend engagement research by emphasizing that fun has the potential to create engagement at the team, unit or organizational level. These differing levels of engagement have not thus far been differentiated in the extant literature.

This paper aims to critically examine the dynamics of fun and well‐being at work, as experienced and perceived by senior managers in a public sector context.

This paper is based on research into well‐being with a British Local Authority, focusing on 12 senior managers through verbal accounts of their own experiences and perceptions of fun initiatives.

The data reveal that managers were not having “fun”. However, well‐being at work emerged as central to influencing and enabling “fun at work” and was strongly linked to eight organisational factors (Working Time Arrangements; Stress Management; Communication Strategies; Reward Strategies; Management Development; Team Working; Relationships with Stakeholders; Clarification and Reduction in Change Initiatives). Thus whilst “Fun at work” prescriptions are common in the literature, findings from these accounts indicate people might be happier to experience better well‐being at work.

Senior managers’ accounts of well‐being identified salient issues, thus providing a basis for broader research in this area.

Attention to the material aspects of employment relations is recommended over ‘silly hat day’ prescriptions. Organisations wishing to enhance fun at work could focus efforts on creating organisational conditions that encourage well‐being through the eight identified factors. This has relevance for the employment relationship, and for practitioners and academics alike.

This study makes a distinctive contribution to the fun at work literature by providing rich empirical data, and extending the “tenets of fun” to consider an alternative conceptualisation of “well‐being at work” instead of the organised/managed fun activities presently embraced in the literature.