The emerging marketing tactic of utilizing existing user-generated content (UGC) on the hotel website (i.e., curated UGC) has gained popularity. This research investigates the trust transfer process activated by curated UGC on the hotel website to enhance customers’ attitude toward the hotel (Study 1). Furthermore, the customers’ decision confidence level has been explored in the process of trust transfer process from curated UGC (Study 2). Findings from two experiments suggest that curated UGC triggers a transfer of trust from the hotel website to the hotel, which impacts a change in customers' attitudes. However, this effect can be negative when customers’ decision confidence level is low, due to inconsistent reviews on third-party websites. Findings of this research extend the applicability of trust transfer theory to hotel websites, as well as offer strategic guidance for industry practitioners in effectively utilizing the hotel website by incorporating customers’ reviews.
While prior research has emphasized external factors such as cultural or climatic distance, limited attention has been given to tourists’ intrinsic capability to adapt. This study introduces the concept of tourist distance adaptability, defined as tourists’ capability to adapt to multidimensional cross-national distance. Grounded in experiential learning theory, this study develops and validates a tourist distance adaptability scale, integrating four aspects: awareness (sensitivity, risk management), attitudes (positivism, tolerance), skills (flexibility, adjustment, learning ability), and emotion (emotional response). Results show that tourist distance adaptability contributes to increased tourist satisfaction, which in turn enhances revisit intention and positive word-of-mouth communication. The scale offers practical value for market segmentation and experience design and advances theoretical understanding by highlighting tourists’ active agency and its implications for overseas travel decisions.
Guided by social exchange theory, we investigate whether and how leader hypocrisy can inhibit frontline hospitality employees from taking charge in customer service. We gathered multi-wave data from frontline hospitality employees and their supervisors to examine our model. The findings demonstrate that leader hypocrisy bears a negative association with taking charge in customer service through felt obligation. Furthermore, our results indicate that implicit theories of morality, as an individual difference variable, moderate both the direct connection between leader hypocrisy and felt obligation and the indirect effects of leader hypocrisy on taking charge in customer service. Several theoretical and practical recommendations are noted.
In hospitality settings, customers infer organizational values through frontline service encounters. Drawing on signaling theory and social identity theory, this study examines how employee-oriented organizational values are associated with customer identification. Matched multi-source data from 44 Chinese restaurants (866 frontline employees and 2,583 customers) were analyzed using three-level multilevel structural equation modeling. Employee orientation was positively associated with employee identification, which related to customer orientation and customer identification; customer orientation mediated the employee identification–customer identification relationship. Organizational formalization strengthened the employee orientation–employee identification association and the overall cross-level process. These findings show how organizational signals may be associated with customer outcomes across the firm–employee–customer chain and position frontline employees as both receivers and transmitters of organizational signals.
This study examines the effects of exploitative leadership on quiet quitting and its consequences in the hospitality industry, while exploring how these relationships differ across age groups. Data were collected from 400 hotel employees and analyzed using structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis. The results indicate that exploitative leadership increases organizational cynicism, which in turn promotes quiet quitting and subsequently leads to silence behavior and counterproductive work behavior. Multi-group analysis revealed significant age differences: employees aged 40 and above were more strongly influenced by exploitative leadership and organizational cynicism, whereas employees in their 20s and 30s showed stronger links between detachment and silence behavior. These findings highlight the importance of addressing exploitative leadership to reduce employee disengagement and its negative behavioral outcomes. These findings suggest that hospitality organizations should eliminate exploitative leadership as a root cause and understand age-specific patterns in how employees engage in quiet quitting.
