Purpose
The purpose of this study is to develop a theory that explains how organizations can create a more inclusive atmosphere on the individual, organizational and societal levels. The consequences ...of an inclusive environment were subsequently developed and explored.
Design/methodology/approach
Constructivist grounded theory methods were used to collect and analyze data from interviews with 20 hotel executives and their company websites.
Findings
The findings of this study produced a theoretical framework for inclusion in hotel leadership, leadership inclusion theory (LIT). The LIT states organizations must address individual differences, organizational policies and culture and societal norms to develop an inclusive environment. Equity follows inclusion as the value for individual differences makes equitable treatment easier. Finally, diversity increases through increased inclusion and equity.
Practical implications
The LIT describes steps for managers to take to develop an inclusive environment, establish equitable practices and increase diversity within an organization.
Social implications
The LIT highlights several unintended exclusion practices and generational attitudes that are common among organizations. By making conscious efforts, managers can take deliberate actions to establish a perceived environment of equality.
Originality/value
The LIT is a seminal theory-building effort grounded in hospitality. It explains the when and why of several phenomena related to inequality in the hotel industry and how to overcome such imbalances.
Although many political leaders communicate with foreign leaders and publics through social media, limited knowledge exists concerning its impact on global travel. However, signaling theory suggests ...that a political leader's social media communication signals their honest feelings regarding a country. In response, that country's residents counter signal via travel behaviors toward the country whose leader made the remarks. When a political leader's communication is positive toward a country, it is called social media diplomacy (SMD). Comparatively, negative communication is called damaging political rhetoric (ANTI-SMD). Furthermore, this study examined whether a trip's purpose moderates SMD and ANTI-SMD effects on global travel. Resultantly, SARIMAX time-series modeling found SMD had positive effects on pleasure travel flow and no impact on business or student travelers, while ANTI-SMD caused pleasure travelers to avoid a destination.
Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) offers important opportunities for the hospitality and tourism (HT) industry in the context of operations, design, marketing, destination management, human ...resources, revenue management, accounting and finance, strategic management, and beyond. However, the implementation of GAI in HT contexts comes with ethical, legal, social, and economic considerations that require careful reflection by HT firms. The purpose of this study is to offer a critical examination of the effects of GAI applications across a broad spectrum of stakeholders in the HT industry, in an effort to integrate practical and academic insights and foresights and drive academic research forward. Through the contributions of a purposeful selection of scholars, educators, and industry-practitioners, along the tenets of the stakeholder theory of the firm, this study highlights the potential challenges and opportunities of GAI and considers how academics can navigate the (research) complexities of this rapidly evolving technological phenomenon.
This study provides a systematic review of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the hospitality management literature over the last decade. In contrast to prior reviews, this article starts from ...a broader analysis, followed by a narrower, micro-level examination of the hospitality management literature that links CSR to customers’ and employees’ attitudes and behaviors. The findings of this review show that researchers study CSR primarily from a meso-level perspective of how CSR is developed and implemented by organizations, and how it influences financial performance. This study found that although employees have long been crucial stakeholders in service environments, hospitality researchers have only recently begun to focus on understanding the relationships between CSR and employee behaviors and attitudes. This study provides directions for future research by identifying research gaps and comparing the results of this review with those of organizational psychology and management reviews.
•Communication following the CDC norms affected employees’ emotions.•Employees’ gratitude and fear toward the organization affected organizational trust.•Through fear, trust declined when the message ...focused on business bottom-line.•Through gratitude, both focuses had positive effects on organizational trust.
During a crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, what managers communicate to their employees can greatly impact important organizational attitudes, such as organizational trust. There is, however, very little research focusing on the mechanisms explaining how managers’ messages during a crisis can influence employees’ organizational trust. To address this gap, the current study examined the role that emotions play in developing organizational trust using a 2 (following CDC norms vs. ignoring CDC norms) by 2 (employee focus vs. bottom-line focus) between-subjects factorial experiment, with COVID-19 as the context. The results showed that a manager’s communication that followed the CDC social norms made employees feel grateful, whereas communication that ignored CDC social norms enhanced fear and anger toward the organization. The feelings of gratefulness and fear influenced organizational trust. These results provide important theoretical and practical implications for understanding organizational trust during a crisis.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies and activities are aimed at, executed for, and witnessed by individuals, yet CSR literature has long overlooked assessing CSR outcomes at the individual ...level. Previous CSR research has focused primarily on macro- and institutional-level outcomes. The current paper addresses this issue by analyzing the influence of CSR on a crucial stakeholder for hospitality organizations: their employees. Specifically, gratitude and compassion at work were tested as parallel mediators between employees’ perceptions of CSR and their well-being and organizational citizenship behavior directed toward the organization (OCBO). Drawing from the affect theory of social exchange and moral emotions, this article aims to understand how CSR leads to improving employees’ well-being and OCBO through the underlying emotional mechanisms of gratitude and compassion. Survey data from two independent samples were gathered to test the hypotheses. The findings revealed that employees’ perceptions of CSR activities had a significant positive direct effect on eudaimonic well-being but not on hedonic well-being. Gratitude mediated the relationship between perceived CSR and OCBO as well as hedonic well-being. Compassion mediated the relationship between perceived CSR and hedonic well-being as well as OCBO. Besides theoretical contributions of testing these mechanisms together in a hospitality context and evaluating the influence of CSR efforts on certain dimensions of well-being, this research will be particularly relevant to hospitality managers when formulating CSR strategies and promoting a CSR culture.
Wages and benefits in the hospitality industry are notoriously low, and tight margins often mean that organizations do not have the resources to increase pay. Existing research has demonstrated that ...low pay is a large factor in the high rate of turnover in the hospitality industry. Therefore, the present study aimed to understand whether enriching job characteristics such as job variety may attenuate the relationship between pay and benefit satisfaction. Specifically, we hypothesized and found that when pay and benefit satisfaction was low, job variety could reduce employee turnover intentions by improving the employee-organization relationship through the development of perceived organizational support. Our findings demonstrate the value in using creative means to develop the employee-organization relationship when organizations cannot increase pay.
•Pay and benefit satisfaction is negatively related to turnover intentions.•Perceived organizational support mediates this relationship.•Job variety attenuates the negative effects of low pay and benefit satisfaction.
In an increasingly service-oriented economy, the importance of understanding supervisors’ impact on employees working in a fun work environment continues to grow. While researchers have learned much ...about the negative outcomes of abusive supervisors, relatively little is known about ebullient supervisors and the beneficial outcomes caused by leaders who create fun work environments for employees. The purpose of this article is to define the concept of an ebullient supervisor and develop and validate a scale to measure the construct of ebullient supervision (ES). A brief overview of the construct is presented along with its anticipated theoretical and empirical relationships with constructs that might be closely related. Construct definitions are developed and items for an ES measure are evaluated using a three-sample validation study. A combined exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis approach was used. This was followed by an analysis of the criterion-related validity. The results show that the ES has convergent validity with other supervisor support measures. One of the distinguishing factors of an ES, however, is that through the supervisor’s actions and behaviors the ebullient supervisor helps create a fun work environment for employees that may have many beneficial outcomes for organizations. Developing a measure of ES allows future researchers to add new insights to the management literature by being able to better investigate the unique benefits of this type of supervision for both organizations and employees.
This study used a 2 × 2 × 2 experimental research design to examine the influence of organizational support, supervisor support, and coworker support for error management practices on employees' ...service recovery performance and helping behaviors during service recoveries. More importantly, the current work examined the mediating role of psychological safety and learning behaviors on the proposed relationships. Two hundred eighty-four undergraduate students from a large university in the southwestern United States participated in the study and were randomly assigned to one of the eight experimental conditions. All respondents worked either full-time or part-time in various hospitality organizations, including hotels and restaurants. Results indicate that organizational support, supervisor support, and coworker support for error management had a positive effect on employees' service recovery performance and helping behaviors. Moreover, the study found the mediating effects of psychological safety and learning behaviors. The study's implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed.
In response to the ongoing concern regarding a science-practice gap, we propose a customer-centric approach to reporting significant research results that involves a sequence of three interdependent ...steps. The first step involves setting an alpha level (i.e., a priori Type I error rate) that considers the relative seriousness of falsely rejecting a null hypothesis of no effect or relationship (i.e., Type I error) relative to not detecting an existing effect or relationship (i.e., Type II error) and reporting the actual observed p value (i.e., probability that the data would be obtained if the null hypothesis is true). The second step involves reporting estimates of the size of the effect or relationship, which indicate the extent to which an outcome is explained or predicted. The third step includes reporting results of a qualitative study to gather evidence regarding the practical significance of the effect or relationship. Our proposal to report research results with rigor, relevance, and practical impact involves important changes in how we report research results with the goal to bridge the science-practice gap.
