قلب موفق: تجزیه و تحلیل ساختاری از رابطه تنش زا - فشار و مشتری مداری در میان کارگران هیجانی در هتل های کره ای

This study examined the structural relationships among three different dimensions of workplace stressors (customer-related stressor, CRS; work environment-related stressor, WERS; job-related stressor, JRS), negative affectivity (NA), emotional exhaustion (EE), and the negative effect of that strain on customer orientation (CO) in the context of the emotional labor (EL) of frontline employees in the hotel industry. Data were collected from self-administrated questionnaires distributed among frontline employees in room and F&B divisions in Korean deluxe tourist hotels, where EL is intense. The results of the structural equation analysis indicated a positive association between all three workplace stressors and NA and between NA and EE. There was also a relationship in the opposite direction with EE and CO, as hypothesized. The moderating effect of organizational level on the workplace stressors–NA relationships was also confirmed. In addition, in an alternative model, we found that NA partially mediates the relationship between JRS and EE; whereas, NA fully mediates the relationships between CRS/WERS and EE. Practical implications are discussed in detail and limitations of the study and future research directions are also suggested.

The biggest issue for human resource management (HRM) of organizations is to socialize their frontline employees by shaping and directing their behavior. Most training programs in the hotel industry are geared toward achieving this goal. Pugh's (2001) research revealed that frontline employees can transmit their emotions to customers in a service encounter. Thus, positive emotional displays by frontline employees lead to positive emotive experiences, resulting in higher customer evaluations of service quality. In the hotel industry, service providers’ emotional displays are pivotal to successfully creating and delivering a delightful service experience. This is directly linked to a service organization's bottom-line, as suggested by the service-profit chain that links employee attitudes, customer satisfaction, and organizational profits (Babakus et al., 2009). Given that the “performance” of frontline employees is a managerial object, are their emotions also objects of management? If so, how are frontline employees’ emotions managed? This is a particularly critical concern for the hospitality industry due to the inseparability of the end product from those who produce it. Hochschild (1983) coined the term “emotional labor (EL),” referring to the expression of emotions and creation of feelings as an expected part of work roles. EL requires “face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public, and the workers are required to produce an emotional state in another person and allow the employer to exercise a degree of control over the emotional activities of frontline employees” (Hochschild, 1983, p. 147). In the fiercely competitive industry of full service luxury hotels, the EL expected of frontline employees is intense due to the high expectations of customers and diminishing differences in facilities and amenities among numerous competitors. Therefore, the quality of service transactions in such hotels is often determined by the frontline employees’ personal service (Pugh, 2001). This requires a higher standard of emotional display rules for frontline employees. Hotel management should take a serious look at EL issues from two perspectives that are traditionally distinguished: HRM and marketing. This integrated perspective provides hotel managers with critical insight into how to create customer equity through effective management of their human capital. Given that frontline employees are the most critical element of a hotel marketing strategy, examining the workplace stressor–strain relationship and its consequence for hotel employees should be a major concern for scholarly researchers and marketing practitioners alike (Singh, 2000). Frontline employees are direct participants in implementing the marketing concept (Brown et al., 2002), and their attitudes and behaviors toward customers determine customers’ perceptions of service quality and satisfaction, which in turn affects organizational performance (Rust et al., 1996). A vast array of empirical evidence exists on the direct influence of emotional exhaustion (EE) on outcomes such as lower job performance (e.g., Cropanzano et al., 2003 and Karatepe and Aleshinloye, 2009), lower job satisfaction (e.g., Karatepe, 2006, Karatepe et al., 2009 and Mulki et al., 2006), and higher turnover intentions (e.g., Babakus et al., 2008, Cropanzano et al., 2003, Karatepe and Aleshinloye, 2009 and Karatepe et al., 2009) in various fields. However, the dysfunctional influence of EE on customer orientation (CO) has been left largely untouched. The paucity of research is due to the fact that EL issues have been treated mainly within the areas of HRM and organizational behavior (OB), but not critically from a marketing perspective. A recent exception to this is a study by Julian (2008) that explored critical managerial/marketing issues related to EL using case studies. It was concluded that CO is a key outcome variable and deserves more attention from both marketing researchers and practitioners alike. Therefore, this study attempts to close the research gap by expanding a stressor–strain model postulating CO as a direct outcome variable. Integrating HRM and marketing in this study allows us to go beyond the negative effects of EL on personal level and examine the structural relationship among workplace stressors, strain outcome, and the effectiveness of hotels in terms of their marketing performance. Another meaningful contribution of this study is the examination of the effects of an entire array of workplace stressor factors on employees’ strain which can take various progressive forms, including emotional, psychological, physical, social, and behavioral outcomes (for the entire facets of strain, see Beehr and Newman, 1978). In numerous studies, diverse stressors have been identified. However, most of these deal with the stress factors sporadically. A multi-disciplinary literature review in such areas as organizational studies, marketing, psychology, and sociology converged into three main domains of workplace stressors that evoke NA in employees and lead to EE in a customer encounter: customer-related stressor (CRS) (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993, Cordes and Dougherty, 1993, Dormann and Zapf, 2004, Fullerton and Punj, 2004, Grandey et al., 2007 and Karatepe et al., 2010), work environment-related stressor (WERS) (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993, Pugh, 2001, Rafaeli and Sutton, 1987 and Sutton and Rafaeli, 1988), and job-related stressor (JRS) (Chen and Spector, 1991, Jamal, 2004, Morris and Feldman, 1996 and Ross, 1993). These studies, however, tested their effects separately. We simultaneously tested the entire array of workplace stressor factors in a single model. Accurate information regarding the comparative effects of such factors will allow hotel managers to effectively cope with workplace stressors. Another important research question we explored is the moderating effect of organizational level (OL) on the workplace stressors–NA relationship. The main purpose of our model specification regarding the moderating role of OL is to provide theoretical and practical implications. The stressor–NA relationship and its outcome must be different across rank and file level (RFL) employees and over supervisory level (OSL) employees. Coping mechanisms and resources used by RFL employees and OSL employees of hotels may not be the same. There seems to be a justification for different treatment and programs designed to alleviate the EL and its negative consequence for the RFL employees and OSL employees separately. This approach is of particular use for managers of the hotel industry. They need to understand how and why a certain stressor intensifies the EL of their employees in order to develop coping strategies and training programs tailored to employees’ needs at different organizational ranks. The principal objective of this study is to test a theoretical model purported to analyze the structural relationships among key constructs related to EL, including NA and its antecedents (i.e., workplace stressors: CRS, WERS, and JRS), EE, and its dysfunctional effect on CO. The specific objectives of this study are four-fold: (1) to identify and categorize workplace stressors that precede the NA of hotel frontline employees and examine the relative effect of each factor directly related to NA; (2) to examine the structural relationships among NA, EE, and CO; (3) to investigate the moderating role of OL, RFL vs. OSL, on the relationship between workplace stressors and employees’ NA; and (4) to examine the mediating role of employees’ NA between workplace stressors and EE in an alternative model. The findings of this study can serve as a theoretical basis for EL research in hotels with respect to the workplace stressor–strain relationship and its consequence from both an HRM and marketing perspectives.

In this study the workplace stress factors that affect NA among hotel frontline employees were identified and categorized into three dimensions of CRS, WERS, and JRS, which are significant antecedents of NA. More importantly, the effect on NA of each factor was empirically tested and compared. As hypothesized, all of the workplace stressors, CRS, WERS, and JRS, had significant effects on NA among hotel frontline employees. These findings can be explained based on Brymer et al.’s (1991) research, which argued that hotel employees are involved with high levels of EL and tend to experience more strain as a consequence of workplace stress. Those stress factors collectively explained more than 55% of the total variance of NA (Fig. 2) within the sample of this study. The findings are consistent with previous studies (e.g., Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993, Chen and Spector, 1991, Fullerton and Punj, 2004, Morris and Feldman, 1996 and Sutton and Rafaeli, 1988), where workplace stress factors are related to negative emotional and behavioral outcomes. In this study the relative effect of each workplace stress factor on NA was also compared. JRS turned out to be the most influential factor affecting respondents’ NA; irregular work schedule, unexpected calls, excessive workload, and forceful participation in training programs caused the most NA among the respondents. Having to deal with overly demanding customers was another stressor that increased hotel employees’ NA in service encounters. Interestingly, CRS exerted less influence on NA compared with JRS. Although significantly related to NA, WERS was the least significant factor affecting NA. Given that the sample is from five-star and above hotels, the employees may be given appropriate physical facilities for their needs. Further, the respondents may have sufficient training to value the business customers bring and appreciate their guests in any situation. As found repeatedly in previous studies (e.g., Chen and Spector, 1991 and Morris and Feldman, 1996), job ambiguity, work overloads, and irregular work schedules seem to create more negative feelings, emotions, and attitudes than any other factor. Another important finding of this study is the moderating effect of OL on the workplace stressors–NA relationship. The quality of the relationship was explored by incorporating the OL effect in the model as a qualifier of the workplace stressors–NA relationship. The results show that all three dimensions of workplace stressors, CRS, WERS, and JRS showed statistically significant effects among RFL employees, whereas only JRS turned out to be significant for OSL employees (Table 5 and Fig. 3). A formal test to compare the corresponding path coefficients in the structural model confirmed statistically significant differences across the two groups in all three pairs of comparisons (Table 5 and Fig. 3). This finding supports previous work in OB and management fields (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993, Chen and Spector, 1991, Morris and Feldman, 1996, Rafaeli and Sutton, 1987 and Sutton and Rafaeli, 1988). Given the nature of the hotel industry, stressors in all three areas seem to impede the coping process for lower level employees because they have less authority and control over stressful conditions and limited coping resources (Fisher and Gitelson, 1983 and Hamner and Tosi, 1974). As for the links in the workplace stressor–strain model of this study, hotel frontline employees’ EE was hypothesized to have a reverse relationship with CO. The empirical result indicated a significant reverse relationship between employees’ EE and CO. This result implies that when hotel frontline employees experience EE, they are less likely to have customer oriented attitudes and behaviors. Accordingly, their active interaction with customers, genuine interest in customers’ needs, willingness to provide information to customers, and efforts to solve customers’ problems decreased. Finally, this study examined the direct and indirect effects in an effort to gain insights into hotel employees’ EE process. Turning to mediating role of NA between three workplace stressors (i.e., CRS, WERS, and JRS) and EE, our results indicated that NA fully mediates the relationships between CRS, WERS and EE: when NA effect was removed from the relationship between CRS, WER and EE, the effects from CRS and WER on EE turned out to be completely insignificant. JRS, however, had both a significant positive direct effect on EE and an indirect effect on EE via NA. Thus, NA is partially mediated by the relationship between JRS and EE. This result confirms the salient feature of NA as the link between employees’ perceived JRS and EE in hotels. What we learned from this empirical study is that managing hotel frontline employees’ EL is foundational for marketing success. Hotel employees are exposed to heavy EL on a daily basis. Managing their inner emotions, not just their surface behaviors, is a critical HRM issue because it is ultimately tied to the long-term marketing goal: making lasting relationships with valued customers. The complexity of the structural relationships among the variables in stressor–strain relationship and their consequences has not been fully disentangled in this one cross-sectional study. However, this study makes a meaningful contribution to the existing body of knowledge on EL in the hospitality industry. First, we identified and categorized stress inducing factors and were able to compare the relative magnitude of each effect on NA. Second, the effect of NA as a mediator between workplace stress factors and strain outcomes was also tested. Third, by postulating CO as a key outcome variable, we incorporated HRM issues and marketing concerns in a single model. Last, but not the least, we tested the moderating effect of OL among hotel frontline employees, which helped us understand why and how we should strategically deal with the EL of employees. Although this study only used two groups of employees, RFL and OSL, they showed distinctly different emotional reactions to workplace stressors. These results imply many HRM related questions and open new venues to explore in the future.