The effect of hospitality conference messaging on employee job responses

Abstract

Despite the prevalent practice of organizing costly annual leadership conferences by hospitality organizations, little is known about the impact of such conferences on employees’ job outcomes. This study is the first to examine the effectiveness of conference messages on attendee-employee job response. Data was collected using self-administered questionnaires from 235 leadership conference participants including corporate employees and hotel general managers of a well-known US-based limited-service hotel chain. Based on signaling theory, the results indicated that in the relatively less distorted signaling environment of the annual leadership conference, when a signaler (corporate leadership) sends an observable and strong signal (conference message) to a receiver (conference attendee) it positively and significantly influenced employee engagement, service climate, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Statistically significant differences were found between first-time and repeat conference attendees, indicating stronger results overall for first-time attendees.