Employees’ Organizational Commitment Challenges - a Hotel Industry Perspective

Abstract

Hotel industry is confronted with some challenges induced by changing customers’ requirements and by a competitive environment. In this context, front-line employees are a very important determinant of organizational performance. Researchers suggested that organizational performance can be achieved through employee organizational commitment (OC) development. This is the reason why this paper aims to explore employees’ level of OC components from hotel chains, considering a variety of independent variables. Furthermore, recommendations for hotel managers who want to improve employees’ OC are offered. A quantitative study was conducted on 152 employees from 12 hotels belonging to four international and national hotel chains. We first verified if the same OC components from scholarly literature can be identified in Romanian context. Then, an analysis on differences registered for these OC components was conducted, considering variables like age, gender, educational level, work experience, hotel chain name, hotel location, etc. Considering results, we identified all the three OC components presented in the literature (affective, normative and continuance commitment) and also found that affective commitment reaches the highest level of manifestation for the hotel chain employees from our study. Statistically significant differences between the level of OC manifestations are registered for normative commitment considering the “hotel chain”, respondents’ “educational level”, and “hotel chain belonging” variables and also for affective and normative commitment considering the “hotel location” variable. Even though we found support for these differences only for some of the independent variable, we could still draw some guidelines for hotel managers.