Household Support: An Ignorantly Key Factor for Tour Guide’s Profession Loyalty. A Case Study in China

Abstract

Tour guides play an essential role in tourism industry. However, in practice, a large majority of experienced tour guides commonly make attempts to switch to other sectors instead of other enterprises of tourism industry after they have three to five year of work experience. In order to disclose the reasons of the phenomenon data from 113 valid samples was obtained through paper-based questionnaires. Meanwhile, partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) is employed assessing the research model in which we hypothesize household support, economic rewards, social rewards and career prospects have positively influence profession loyalty. The results show effect of household support (p<0.01) and economic rewards (p<0.1) are statistically significant respectively. Household support is a very key factor on tour guide’s profession loyalty contrasted with others. Finally, the limitations of the study are discussed. 1.Introduction Employee loyalty is a very popular topic in human resource research. The higher level of employee loyalty can give enterprises many benefits, such as decreasing cost and increasing work efficiency. In contrast, profession loyalty means employees continue to work in a sector many years also have many advantages. It provides abundantly experienced workers and axes dozens of training costs for a sector. This further prompts the sector booming. However, previous studies lay more stress on employee loyalty and less on profession loyalty. In terms of employee loyalty, Antecedents mainly focus on factors affecting profession loyalty. The main factors include employee satisfaction, work environment, work revenues, employee empowerment as well as employee personality [1-4]. On the contrary, the discussion on factors affecting profession loyalty remains in its infancy. In practice, profession loyalty is equally important with employee loyalty. Thus, we further develop it. Tour guides play an interface role between the tourism destinations with its visitors through their knowledge and interpretation [5]. An abundance of veteran tour guides are essential elements in tourism development. However, in practice, we find the tour guide sector constantly has a dilemma. On the one hand it has a considerable labor demand along with booming tourism, on the other hand a ton of veteran tour guides often choose to switch sectors instead of enterprises when they have served for several years. Jiang & Tribe (2009) 3rd International Conference on Education, Culture and Social Development (ICECSD 2019) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 344