Understanding regulatory focuses : The role of employees’ regulatory focus in stress coping styles, and turnover intent to a five-star hotel

Purpose – The aim of the study was to examine whether five-star hotel employees’ promotion focus significantly influences their task-coping style, and whether their prevention focus has a significant effect on their emotion- and avoidance-coping styles. This study also investigates the moderating impact of employees’ tenure on the relationships between stress-coping styles and turnover intent. Design/methodology/approach – A total of 342 five-star hotel employees in South Korea participated in the study using a self-administered questionnaire. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used to examine the hypothesized relationships between the constructs. Findings – Hotel employees’ turnover intent decreases when they are motivated by strategies corresponding to their regulatory focus. This study found that hotel employees’ promotion focus had a significant positive effect on their task-coping style, whereas prevention focus had a significant negative effect on the emotion- and avoidance-coping style. In addition, employees’ task-coping style negatively affected their intent to leave the organization, while their emotion-coping and avoidance-coping styles positively affected turnover intent. Finally, moderating effects were related to tenure in the causal relationships among stress-coping styles and turnover intent. Thus, one can infer that the emotion-coping style has a greater effect on turnover intent in employees with a relatively short tenure than in those with a long tenure. Practical implications – This study verified that hotel employees’ regulatory focus plays an important role in employee behavior within organizations just as individual characteristics such as personality or values do. Thus, a substantial application plan for employees’ regulatory focus was proposed for the organizational dimension. In addition, diverse plans were presented for employees’ flexible coping with stress, based on differing turnover intent, depending on employees’ stress-coping styles. Through this, a plan for reducing employee turnover intent was pursued. Originality/value – This study associated employees’ stress-coping styles, which had been dealt with in the human resources management area, with their regulatory focus and showed that different stress-coping styles might be derived using such regulatory focus; the resulting turnover intent might also be different. The study results can provide a theoretical basis for understanding relationships among regulatory focus, stress-copying styles and turnover intent as such research is relatively lacking. Finally, this study is meaningful in that it applied the regulatory focus theory centered on customer behaviors to employees and verified the moderating effect of employees’ tenure between stress-coping styles and turnover intent.