An analysis of the key determinants of hotel employees' ethical behavior

Abstract

Abstract One of the main challenges plaguing the hotel industry today is the unethical behavior of its employees which spreads like a bad, contagious disease across all departments of a hotel company, has a strong negative impact on hotel operations, results in huge financial losses and other detrimental consequences and has become a major headache for many hotel companies. The purpose of this study is to identify what the main factors are that impact the ethical behavior of hotel employees to help hotels understand the source of this problem. More specifically, this study attempts to replicate Deshpande, Joseph, and Prasad's (2006) study -which was conducted in hospitals-in three, four, and five star hotels in Greece to examine whether it will yield similar results. This study is based on a previous work that the first author presented at the EuroCHRIE 2013 conference in Freiburg, Germany and is among the first ones to be conducted in hotels as most research studies on this topic were conducted in non-hospitality settings. The examined factors include the following: the ethical behavior of peers and managers, the hotel employees' business ethics education, as well as the role of gender, nationality, age, level of education and length of time that participants have worked in the position they were in as well as in the hotel industry overall. Results revealed that some of these factors are key determinants that rule the ethical behavior of employees regardless of the setting they are in.