leadership and motivation in hospitality

(Nandana) #1

somewhat flexibly, although efforts were made to relate the identity of the new
construct to the original constructs and to the broader Employee Attitudes
category of the organising framework in which all three of the initial constructs
are located. The steps for interpreting the new EPA construct are discussed in
some detail in Section 7.6 above. In many ways, the EPA construct is similar to
Work Meaning, however it also contains the emotional attachment component
that was originally part of the Affective Organisational Commitment construct.


Both Job Performance (JP) and Discretionary Service Behaviour (DSB) measure
employees’ work motivation. Job Performance (JP) is developed from (i) research
narratives that posit extra effort as a measure of motivated employees (e.g.
Georgopoulos et al. 1957: 345) and (ii) leadership theory where extra effort is
one outcome of transformational leadership (e.g. Bass and Avolio 2008; Limsila
and Ogunlana 2008: 167).


Job Performance saw the removal of JP3 (How often do you find that you have
done more than you expected to do?). Perhaps the JP3 item did not work well
with this sample because waiting staff cannot practically ‘do more than they
expected to do’. That is, a member of the waiting staff expects to serve all of the
customers that arrive during a serving, and by the end of the service, all of the
customers have been attended to.


Put another way, ‘expected effort’ is somewhat delimited by the requirement to
serve all the customers and effort beyond this is neither a requirement nor is it
feasible (since there are no more customers to serve). JP4 was retained
throughout the model development owing to its core substantive role of relating
the JP construct to the service context and its reflection of the DSB2 indicator in
the Discretionary Service Behaviour construct. The Job Performance construct
remains largely unchanged.


Discretionary Service Behaviour was included in the survey with all four items as
described by Simons (2010). There is a considerable degree of item content
overlap amongst the four indicators, in particular, between items DSB2
(answering a guest’s question), DSB3 (delivering a guest’s special request) and
DSB4 (taking time to talk with a guest). Accordingly, the removal of DSB3 and
DSB4 has not drastically altered the meaning of the factor.

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