Work engagement of hospitality employees: examining work stresses as antecedents and customer orientation and employee voice as outcomes

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This dissertation investigated the antecedents and outcomes of work engagement that commonly exist in the hospitality industry. The antecedents studied in this research include multitasking job demand, display rules, and hospitality employees' perception of multitasking and display rules in terms of challenge stress and hindrance stress. This study also examined the moderating effects of polychronicity and emotional intelligence on hospitality employees' perception of multitasking and display rules. The outcomes studied in this dissertation include customer orientation and employee voice. This research conducted a survey with the study variables on hotel employees in a coast city in China, and 342 usable questionnaires were used to test the study model. Structural equation modeling was employed to test the hypothesized model including work engagement and its antecedents (multitasking, display rules, challenge stress and hindrance stress) and outcomes (customer orientation and employee voice). Multi-group SEM analyses were conducted to test the moderating effects of polychronicity and emotional intelligence on respondents' perception of multitasking and display rules respectively. The main findings of this study include: hospitality employees perceive multitasking as both challenge stress and hindrance stress, perceive display rules only as challenge stress; polychronicity moderates hospitality employees' perception of multitasking as hindrance stress; challenge stress increases work engagement, and work engagement increase customer orientation and employee voice. The contributions, implications and limitations of the study were discussed and suggestions for future study were addressed in the final chapter of the dissertation.