The Impact of Ethical Work Climate on Employees’ Organizational Job Embeddedness in Hotels

Document Type : Original Article

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Abstract

Hotels are now challenged to retain employees and understand why they are leaving their jobs early. Ethical work climate (EWC) is an organizational factor that influences employees’ attitudes and behaviors. Gaining knowledge about the impact of EWC can help hotel managers to deal effectively with dysfunctional behaviors and make a difference in increasing organizational job embeddedness (JE) of hotel employees. JE represents the forces that keep employees attached to their jobs and organizations. Despite the importance of EWC and JE for organizations and individuals, they have received very limited study, especially in the hospitality field. Therefore, this paper examines the extent to which the organization creates EWC; investigates the degree of the employees’ JE; and measures the relationship between these two variables. For achieving these objectives, data were collected using questionnaires. A convenience sample of 700 hotel employees from 14 five-star hotels in Sharm ElShiekh was chosen for investigation. From the 700 questionnaires that were distributed, 385 valid questionnaire forms were received from the respondents with response rate of 55 per cent. To analyze these forms, descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests, as well as multiple regression analysis were used.  The findings showed that EWC, including instrumental climate; caring climate; independence climate; rules climate; and law and code climate directly influence JE. In addition, demographic factors (i.e. age, gender, educational level, position, and work experience) were found to positively influence JE. Thus, it was recommended that hotel management should apply several ways to keep and hire effective employees, such as prevailing a strong ethical climate in hotels, particularly in food and beverage and housekeeping departments; paying more attention to the independence EWC; hiring male employees aged from 18 to 35 years who are university or high school graduates; and hiring persons whose personal and ethical values fit well with the organization ethical cli­mate.

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