۱- Introduction

۲- Theoretical background

۳- Hypotheses developmen

۴- Methods

۵- Results

۶- Discussion and theoretical contributions

References

Abstract

A key challenge facing hospitality organizations is how to retain and engage frontline employees who play an important role in influencing customer satisfaction. Although engagement has recently received considerable attention from scholars, much still remains to be learned about its intrinsic motivation and work meaning antecedents. Workplace spirituality has been conceptualized as offering new insights into how individuals experience a deeper level of intrinsic work motivation and engagement. This study found that workplace spirituality has a direct effect on employee engagement and intention to stay in a study of 292 employees in a U.S. hospitality organization. Engagement was found to be related to employees’ service delivery, but not to their intention to stay. In doing so, this study provides new insights into the intrinsic work motivation antecedents of engagement and is the first investigation to empirically assess the joint effects of workplace spirituality and engagement on employee service delivery and intention to stay.

Introduction

Frontline employees play a pivotal role in hospitality customers’ service experience (Kim, Gazzoli, Qu, & Kim, 2016). One important way that organizations can improve service delivery is by more effectively engaging their employees (Hughes & Rog, 2008). Engagement has emerged as an important organizational behavior variable that contributes significantly to employee productivity and in turn to customer satisfaction and organizational performance (i.e. Saks, 2006, 2011). While a considerable number of studies have been conducted on employee engagement, much still remains to be learned about its antecedents (Rich, Lepine, & Crawford, 2010; Wollard & Shuck, 2011). This includes the need to better understand the underlying intrinsic motivation basis for employee engagement (Meyer & Gagne, 2008) and how the level of engagement is impacted by work meaningfulness (Hughes & Rog, 2008). Workplace spirituality is a construct of increasing interest to scholars who see it as providing new insights into work meaning (Rosso, Dekas, & Wrzesniewski, 2010), and employee work attitudes (Benefiel, Fry, & Geigle, 2014; Milliman, Gatling, & Bradley-Geist, 2017), including engagement (Saks, 2011). This study seeks to build on two previous empirical workplace spirituality-engagement studies (Petchsawang & McLean, 2017; Sharma & Hussain, 2012), by examining three dimensions of workplace spiritualty which are conceptually similar to key sources of work meaning as observed in Rosso et al.’s (2010) review of the meaning of work literature. In contrast to prior research, the current study also includes a more recently developed operationalization of engagement by Rich et al. (2010) to avoid potential confounding of this construct with the meaningful work dimension of workplace spirituality. In addition, this is the first investigation to empirically determine the joint effects of workplace spirituality and engagement on employee work attitudes (e.g. involving employee intention to stay and service delivery). In doing so, this study seeks to provide new insights into the antecedents and outcomes of engagement (Wollard & Shuck, 2011; Yeh, 2013) as well as address the need for more empirical research on how workplace spirituality theory can influence organizational behavior variables and performance (Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2003).