International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management最新文献

Purpose

The strategic application of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) is pivotal in shaping tourist decisions. This study aims to examine the nuanced impacts of endorsement styles and the innovative role of emojis on the persuasiveness of eWOM, highlighting essential insights for digital marketing effectiveness.

Design/methodology/approach

Using a robust experimental design, this research engaged 376 participants through scenario-based experiments on popular platforms Ctrip and Xiaohongshu. This study leveraged the professional online data platform, Credamo, to ensure a diverse and representative sample.

Findings

The analysis demonstrates that implicit endorsements, such as “I like this restaurant,” consistently outperform explicit endorsements like “I recommend this restaurant” regarding persuasiveness. This effect is attributed to the enhanced perceived authenticity and reduced persuasion knowledge activation by implicit endorsements. Remarkably, incorporating emojis within explicit endorsements mitigates their inherent drawbacks, enhancing their persuasive impact. In contrast, emojis do not significantly influence the effectiveness of implicit endorsements.

Practical implications

The findings provide significant insights, demonstrating that endorsement styles and emojis play a crucial role in identifying persuasive eWOM and fostering the creation of compelling eWOM for tourism and hospitality marketers. These elements can help marketers effectively track and enhance the impact of eWOM in their digital strategies.

Originality/value

This research maps the effects of endorsement styles and highlights the strategic role of emojis in eWOM, offering practical insights for maximizing persuasion and enhancing digital marketing strategies in tourism and hospitality.

Purpose

This study aims to explore the impacts of service industry employees’ AI awareness on their voice behavior while also considering the dual mediating roles of voice efficacy and job insecurity, as well as the moderating role of trait competitiveness.

Design/methodology/approach

The sample comprises data from a two-wave longitudinal survey of 203 employees in the service sector. This study examined all the hypotheses using Mplus 8.0.

Findings

This study confirms that service sector employees’ AI awareness has significant negative effects on both promotive and prohibitive voice behaviors. Voice efficacy can mediate the negative impact of AI awareness on promotive voice. Both voice efficacy and job insecurity can mediate the negative impact of AI awareness on prohibitive voice. Furthermore, employees’ trait competitiveness can weaken the negative impact of employees’ AI awareness on their voice efficacy.

Practical implications

Managers should first investigate employees’ AI awareness and then adopt targeted managerial strategies to promote their voice behavior.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the literature related to the consequences of AI awareness by linking AI awareness to employee voice behavior. Furthermore, this study deepens our understanding of how AI awareness affects employee voice behavior by proposing voice efficacy (i.e. the efficacy pathway) and job insecurity (i.e. the safety pathway) as key mediating mechanisms. Moreover, this study advances our understanding of when AI awareness influences employee voice behavior by identifying the moderating role of trait competitiveness.

Purpose

Customer value co-creation in robots-mediated hospitality encounters involves active collaboration between customers and robots. In such encounters, robot capabilities, which are their functionalities or operational competences, and robot personalities, which are their interactive behaviors and communication styles, play a key role in enhancing customer value co-creation. The purpose of this study is to draw on service dominant logic to examine the role of robot capabilities and personalities in determining customer value co-creation and service satisfaction.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors adopted a mixed-methods research approach. A netnographic analysis was conducted on online customer reviews for robotic hotels and restaurants to identify key robot capabilities that shaped the customer experiences. Following this, a quantitative study (survey) was conducted to investigate the effects of robot capabilities and personalities on customer value co-creation and service satisfaction.

Findings

From the netnographic analysis, the authors identified cognitive, technical, interactional, emotional, personalization and autonomous capabilities as key robot capabilities influencing customer experiences. The findings of the follow-up empirical study showed that the higher-order robot capabilities construct positively influences customer value co-creation, which, in turn, affects service satisfaction. Furthermore, extroversion robot personality positively moderates this relationship, such that robots with high levels of capabilities result in greater value co-creation when robots possess extroversion personalities compared to introversion personalities.

Practical implications

This study advances the understanding of robot-mediated encounters by emphasizing the role of robot capabilities and personalities as crucial factors for effective customer value co-creation in the hospitality sector. Furthermore, it offers actionable insights for hospitality providers in selection of robots with key capabilities and personalities for enhancing customer satisfaction and successful value co-creation.

Originality/value

While previous research has predominantly focused on customer acceptance of and interaction with robots in the hospitality settings, the present study examined how and when service robots facilitate value co-creation with customers. Specifically, this study explores robot capabilities and personalities in shaping customer value co-creation perceptions. A few recent studies that examined customer-robot interactions have considered specific robot capabilities. However, given that hospitality services are experiential in nature and involve various tasks, a broad range of robot capabilities should be considered for a comprehensive understanding of the customer value co-cre

Purpose

This study aims to examine the influence of imposter syndrome on women’s careers in the hospitality and tourism industry drawing on the role congruity theory of prejudice.

Design/methodology/approach

Employing cross-sectional design, this research analyzed quantitative data from 574 women at various managerial levels using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique.

Findings

The results show that imposter syndrome significantly impacts women employees’ engagement and organizational commitment. The study found that higher levels of diversity management and female role models have a stronger moderating effect on the relationship between imposter syndrome, career expectations, work-family balance, employee engagement, career advancement and organizational commitment whilst lower levels of diversity management and female role models have a weaker moderating effect on these relationships.

Research limitations/implications

This study presents a new theoretical perspective on female employees’ challenges to career advancement. It expands the knowledge of imposter phenomenon and role congruity theory of prejudice, illustrating how imposter syndrome can be influenced not only by individual traits but also by institutional, situational or stereotypical factors.

Practical implications

This work provides valuable insights for hotel policymakers and managers to implement policies that alleviate imposter syndrome and contribute to women’s career development and gender equality in workplaces.

Originality/value

This study can serve to raise awareness of women’s issues in the workplace and offer insightful guidance to organizations to promote diversity and women’s leadership. These pertain to how realistic human resources policies can be used to promote the well-being of hospitality and tourism women employees.

Purpose

With its continuous development and application in the hotel industry, artificial intelligence (AI) is gradually replacing many jobs traditionally performed by humans. This research aims to understand how this threat and opportunity of substitution affects hotel employees’ behavioral decision-making.

Design/methodology/approach

This study uses a structural equation model, ordinary least squares and bootstrapping method to analyze the data collected with a field study and a scenario experiment from star-hotels in Shanghai, Paris and Seoul.

Findings

The results discovered that employees’ AI awareness has a positive relationship with their work engagement and AI boycott through two paths. The promoting path involves recovery level, while the hindering path includes job insecurity. In addition, the estimates showed that AI awareness has a great indirect effect on work engagement or AI boycott when innovativeness as a job requirement is high.

Practical implications

The findings offer insights to help hotels optimize the relationship between AI and hotel human workers while providing valuable implications for addressing behavioral dilemmas faced by hotel employees in the era of AI.

Originality/value

By integrating the behavioral decision-making literature with the conservation of resources theory, the study focuses on the dual mechanisms – challenging and hindering – through which AI awareness influences hotel employees’ coping strategies.

Purpose

In social media context, service failures become public domain, making them visible to vast audiences of customers who are virtually present. Thus, this study aims to discuss the roles of service failure type and management response on observers’ perceived helpfulness.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors conducted econometric analyses on a dataset incorporating 107,984 reviews and 34,641 management responses to negative reviews.

Findings

The results reveal that, for process failures, specifying a form of action (initiatives for solving the problem) is associated with more perceived helpfulness of reviews than accounts (explanation) or acknowledgments (recognition and acceptance), while responding to an outcome failure by providing an account is associated with increased perceived helpfulness of reviews.

Practical implications

For process failures, managers should make every effort to convince observers through specific actions that similar failures are less likely to occur in the future. For outcome failures, managers should strive to provide clear and fast explanations of the failure causes to restore observers’ evaluation of the firm’s capabilities.

Originality/value

The authors’ work extends sparse insights on observers and sheds new light on the effect of service failure type and response strategy on observers’ actual behaviors. The interplay between service failure type and response strategy provides guidance on how to use management responses to influence potential customers.

Purpose

This study aims to examine the impact of peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation platforms’ green marketing on consumers’ pro-environmental behavioural intention through the mediation of consumer trust and engagement, following the social influence theory and the stimulus–organism–response model.

Design/methodology/approach

A questionnaire survey was designed to collect data from American P2P accommodation consumers. Data collection was conducted through an outsourced survey company. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data.

Findings

The study reveals that P2P accommodation platforms’ green marketing orientation was positively associated with consumer trust in the platform and consumer engagement with the platform. Both consumer trust and consumer engagement positively enhanced consumers’ pro-environmental behavioural intention in the P2P accommodation consumption, serving as effective mediators between consumers’ perceptions of green marketing orientation and pro-environmental behavioural intention.

Practical implications

The study offers practical insights for P2P accommodation platforms and operators in engaging in green marketing and fostering consumers’ pro-environmental consumption behaviours in P2P accommodations.

Originality/value

The study addresses the grand question of whether business operators’ responsible production behaviour can possibly lead to consumers’ responsible consumption behaviour in the P2P accommodation sector. It contributes to the literature on P2P accommodation by providing evidence to show green marketing practices of P2P accommodation platforms can lead to consumers’ pro-environmental behavioural intention. It provides both theoretical value for knowledge advancement and practical value to guide more sustainable industry practices.

Purpose

The stereotypical assumptions of what it means to be hegemonically masculine and to be a leader are aligned in current society, potentially creating role incongruity for anyone who does not fit into this definition. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether masculine and feminine leadership traits of men and women hospitality managers affect employees’ intention to trust leaders and organizational attractiveness.

Design/methodology/approach

Explanatory mixed methods were used. First, two experiments (Study 1 = woman manager, n = 137; Study 2 = man manager, n = 117) were conducted with current hospitality employees to test the interaction of masculine versus feminine enactment and the leadership gender composition (3%, 23% or 53% women) on organizational attractiveness and intent to trust the leader. Results did not align with the theories; therefore, three focus groups were held with 13 current hospitality employees.

Findings

Results indicate a shift toward the preference for communal (feminine) characteristics in hospitality leadership with a balance of masculine traits.

Research limitations/implications

The influence of managers’ gender-related behaviors on trust and organizational attractiveness goes beyond their physical gender traits, indicating that gender plays a more crucial role than previously understood.

Originality/value

By using role congruity theory and hegemonic masculinity, this study offers a nuanced understanding of masculine and feminine gender enactment and broadens leadership theory by including the perspectives of nonhegemonic men and assertive women.

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to understand how social media marketing activities (SMMA) influence consumers’ perceived value of online-to-offline food ordering experiences, subsequently affecting satisfaction and intentions to visit physical establishments.

Design/methodology/approach

Data from 845 participants was collected using a purposive sampling technique. Covariance-based structural equation modeling was then applied to assess the conceptual model and its hypotheses.

Findings

Analysis of the structural equation modeling showed support for all hypotheses. SMMA exhibited positive effects on trust, hedonic value and utilitarian value, while these in turn positively influenced the use of online-to-offline food delivery services (O2O-FDS). In addition, results indicated a positive effect of O2O-FDS use on omni-channel restaurant satisfaction which then led to increased intentions to dine in at physical restaurants.

Practical implications

Results suggest that engaging SMMA and O2O-FDS builds trust and encourages in-person visits.

Originality/value

Results from this study build upon the literature by shedding new light on the links between the effects of SMMA, trust, perceived value and consumers’ intentions to visit physical restaurants after using the O2O-FDS. In addition, consumers’ perceived trust, as well as hedonic and utilitarian values, mediate the effect of SMMA on O2O-FDS.

Purpose

What kind of robotic service do customers prefer when they dine out alone? This study aims to investigate how robotic service type affects solo diners’ attitude toward robotic service and restaurant revisit intention, through the mediation of rapport. It also examines the moderating effects of the need to belong and restaurant type.

Design/methodology/approach

Three experiments were conducted. Study 1 used a one-factor between-subjects design to test the effect of robotic service type on rapport and solo diners’ responses. Study 2 conducted a 2 (robotic service type: service-delivery vs entertainment) × need to belong quasi-experimental design to examine the moderation of need to belong. Study 3 used a 2 (robotic service type: service-delivery vs entertainment) × 2 (restaurant type: traditional restaurant vs solo-friendly restaurant) factorial between-subjects design to test the moderation of restaurant type. A qualitative study (Study 4) complements the experimental results based on semistructured interviews.

Findings

Entertainment (vs service-delivery) robotic service has a stronger effect on solo diners’ responses, with rapport serving as a mediator. Additionally, solo diners with a heightened need to belong demonstrate an intensified rapport effect when receiving entertainment-oriented robotic service. Furthermore, restaurant type plays a moderating role between robotic service type and consumer responses. For traditional restaurants, solo diners who receive entertainment (vs service-delivery) robotic service tend to form stronger rapport and favorable responses. The results of the qualitative study elucidate and support the hypothesized relationships of the experimental studies.

Practical implications

Restaurant operators could consider offering entertainment-based smart devices that allow solo diners to indulge themselves during the dining encounter. Restaurants could also design environmental cues that can signify a sense of comfort, such as redesigning tables with individual seats for solo diners to enhance their perceptions of shared characteristics among other solo diners in the same space.

Originality/value

This research advances the literature on solo dining and robotic service, by investigating how human–robot interaction can fulfill solo diners’ relatedness goals, as self-determination theory suggests. This inquiry also represents an early attempt in the hospitality literature to empirically examine the influence of robotic service type on consumer responses through the mediation of rapport.