Abstract
This study uses an integrated model of resource conservation theory and social learning theory to explore the antecedents of hotel interns’ perceptions of occupational stigma and to explore the mechanisms inherent to retention willingness. This study first manipulated relevant subjects’ experimental materials through a contextual experiment and used a one-way ANOVA to test the effects of competence stereotypes and occupational stereotypes on hotel interns’ stigma perceptions, respectively, and then used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) as a statistical tool and the SmartPLS 3.0 program to validate the model of hotel interns’ occupational stigma perceptions-intention. The effects of both competence stereotypes and occupational stereotypes on hotel interns’ perceptions of occupational stigma were significant. The results of the partial least squares structural equation model showed that hotel interns’ perceptions of occupational stigma significantly contributed to emotional exhaustion and that emotional exhaustion significantly influenced hotel interns’ retention willingness, hotel interns’ perceptions of occupational stigma had a significant effect on their retention willingness, while the role of emotional exhaustion as a mediating variable and occupational commitment as a moderator. The inner psychological and behavioral linkage mechanisms of hotel interns’ occupational stigma perceptions and their retention willingness under COVID-19 were explored, and the resource dynamics operating mechanism and professional commitment were also confirmed.
Highlights
The impact of COVID-19 on the hotel hospitality industry is incalculable, and hotels suffer from the lower numbers of guests and the challenges of human resource retention
This study explored the relationship between perceived career stigma and hotel interns’ willingness to stay, and to better select the sample, this study first facilitated sampling to select hotels with five university-enterprise cooperation agreements with universities, and secondly screened case-site hotels that were implementing management trainee programs
Emotional exhaustion was evaluated as Maslach (2001), which is measured by considering the specific context of a particular hotel context
Summary
The impact of COVID-19 on the hotel hospitality industry is incalculable, and hotels suffer from the lower numbers of guests and the challenges of human resource retention. Existing studies have shown the high turnover rate of hotel interns is a long-term challenge for the global hospitality industry, and the loss of interns increases the cost of COVID-19 human resource planning and employes’ output effectiveness in the hospitality industry. This is detrimental to the optimization and implementation of human resource management and planning. Existing stigma studies have empirically studied and analyzed disease stigma using COVID19 as a lens, involving both health and non-health workers (Andaç Demirtas-Madran, 2020; Mostafa et al, 2020) but interns, who are hospitality reservists, encountering front-line work in occupational stigma research has been neglected, and as a typical representative of non-health workers, existing stigma research needs to expand knowledge on occupational stigma research based on organizational behavior (Ramaci et al, 2021) to hotel interns who are not health workers but perform service output at high frequencies and lack a protection system
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