The Study of Working Behavior and Leadership Skills of Professional Tour Guides in Thailand

Abstract

          The purpose of this research was to study the working behavior and leadership skills of professional guides in Thailand and to propose the model of leadership development of professional guides in Thailand. The major informants were professional guides with at least 10 years of working experience and 400 sampling questionnaires collected from professional guides based on Yamane's formulas. They asked the guides in the northern, central, southern and eastern regions. The statistics used percentage, mean and standard deviation. The development of the model developed and the training of 30 students used the knowledge test before and after the training and satisfaction measure. The statistic used Paired t-test.

           The results of the study on working behavior of professional guides by key informants showed that their work behavior was at the highest level in all aspects, especially priority is given to planning the trip before departure. The leadership development model testing by training, the appropriate training format should be taught in one theoretical and one in two by using the facilitator who has experience in the actual work and experience in transferring knowledge and skills, the achievement after training the students had higher average scores than before training, the differences statistically significant at the .05 level.