The roles of hotel identification on customer‐related behavior

Purpose – Past researches have not explored the roles of staff's hotel identification on customer‐related behaviors and the relationship between hotel identification inducing factors (trust in supervisor, job satisfaction, perceived external prestige) and hotel identification. The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles of staff's hotel identification as a mediator of the relationship between hotel identification inducing factors and customer‐related behaviors. Through reviewing the existing literature concerned, the authors propose a research model involving staff's trust in the supervisor, job satisfaction, perceived external prestige, hotel identification, organization citizenship behavior, and customer satisfaction behavior and test it. Design/methodology/approach – Hotel samples were from the south‐west area of Korea. Questionnaires were given to 250 staff of the hotels and 224 were returned with no problems. The sample was used to purify the measures and test their convergent and discriminant validity. The final measurement model includes 24 items across six constructs. The authors conducted exploratory factor analysis to show that there are convergent validities of measurement items related to each construct, and explored correlations between the constructs and calculated average variance extracted to verify that there are discriminant validities between constructs. LISREL 8.30 was used to verify the hypotheses. Findings – The results provided evidence that hotel identification plays important mediating roles between them. Identification with the hotel will be strengthened when job satisfaction and trust in the supervisor becomes strong. Trust in the supervisor plays a more important role in forming hotel identification than job satisfaction does. The role of organization citizenship behavior on the customer satisfaction behavior is also explored. Hotel identification affects organization citizenship behavior which in turn positively affects customer satisfaction behavior. But the results do not provide support for a central role of perceived external prestige. Practical implications – The study gives information to hotel managers who want to encourage customer‐related behaviors that they should induce staff's identification with the hotel by improving the level of trust in the supervisor and job satisfaction. Originality/value – Little past literature has explored the role of hotel identification as the substance of staff action. This study explored the influence of hotel identification on staff behavior that results in contributing to theoretical development and hotel management.