Study On Relationships Among Perceived Workplace Social Support, Emotional Labor And Organizational Commitment With Hospitality Employees

As a member of the service industry, the existence and development of the hospitality industry will be greatly affected by its employee attitude and behavior which displayed in interaction with customers. Given that employee attitude and behavior is virtually the externalization of employees’organizational commitment, managers of hospitality would like to take organizational commitment as one key emphasis of their work, and expecting to improve employees’organizational commitment with effective measures. However, organizational commitment is anything but a single component construct. It contains not only affective commitment which characterized employees’emotional attachment, identification, and devotion to the organization, but also continuance commitment which characterized perceived costs associated with leaving the organization, and normative commitment which characterized a belief about one’s responsibility to act in the way which meets organizational goals and interests. In consideration of differences in both concept and antecedents of the three components of organizational commitment, the author eventually included all of them into the research. On the other hand, employees are not "working robot" who want nothing but money, but living men with flesh and blood, and their own emotions. Therefore, the organization must offer its employees care and support while asking their effort and loyalty. Given that, the author also included workplace social support into the research. Finally, as an industry which involves substantial interaction with customers, employees of the hospitality industry will inevitably suffer from emotional labor, and their differences in personality, customers dealing with, and situation dictate that they will use different emotional labor strategies. Taking that into consideration, the present paper will take surface acting, deep acting, and naturally felt emotion as another research point.After confirming research variables, the author made a great effort to read relevant documents and learned relationships among workplace social support, emotional labor and organizational commitment. Based on this understanding, the author put forward hypothesis and two research purposes of the present paper:first, exploring relationship between organizational commitment and supervisor support as well as coworker support; second, examining the mediation effect of emotional labor on workplace social support and organizational commitment. In order to achieve the above goals, the author firstly used relevant foreign mature scales as reference to design questionnaire of the research, then collecting data successively from hotel staffs in Beijing, Shanghai, and Qingdao, followed using SPSS and AMOS to test reliability and validity of scales and conduct relevant data processing, and finally verified the research hypotheses.At the final stage of the study, the author summarized the research findings and put forward three suggestions for hotel managers with combination of the real situation of the hospitality industry and the author’s deep thinking. Reflection on shortcomings of this paper and some possible directions for future research were given as well.