Internship design and its impact on student satisfaction and intrinsic motivation

This study examines the role that experiential education, in the form of internships, plays in the professional development of hospitality and tourism management students. In particular, it analyzes the internship through an evaluation of job design by both applying J. R. Hackman and G. R. Oldham's (1975) job characteristics model and developing a proposed intern version of that model. The outcomes demonstrate that dimensions of work undertaken during the internship contribute significantly to an individual's satisfaction and intrinsic motivation. A comparison of the 2 models demonstrates that the proposed intern model offers improved R2 coefficients over the original job characteristics model by using different predictive variables and thus may be seen as a better guide for designing effective internship experiences.