The effect of corporate social responsibility on hotel employee safety behavior during COVID-19: The moderation of belief restoration and negative emotions

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Abstract

The effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on employee safety behavior in crisis situations remains as a gap in the hospitality literature. Based upon the social-influence and conservation of resources theories, this research constructed a theoretical model of hotel CSR's influence on employee safety behavior with belief restoration and negative emotions serving as moderation variables. The Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic served as the background, and a questionnaire survey of 23 hotels in China was conducted with 1594 valid responses being received. The results showed that: (1) CSR positively predicted employee safety behavior; CSR had positive influences on safety compliance, participation and adaptation; (2) safety compliance and participation partially mediated the influence of CSR on safety adaptation; and (3) belief restoration positively moderated the relationship between CSR and safety behavior, and negative emotions negatively moderated the relationship between CSR and safety behavior. This research expands the literature coverage on the effectiveness of CSR in a pandemic and hospitality context, as well as being the first to investigate the effect of CSR on employee safety behavior. The CSR practices of hotels are a critical factor in promoting employee safety behavior, mitigating the negative impacts of the crisis, and assisting recovery and future development.

Introduction

COVID-19 greatly affected the operational viability and development potential of tourism and hospitality. In addition, this public health crisis impacted and changed the actions and management practices of hotels (Fong, Law, & Ye, 2020; Zhang, Xie, Wang, Morrison, and Coca-Stefaniak, 2020). The catastrophic and broad market-level impacts of COVID-19 forced hotel companies to consider all potential initiatives that could promote recovery and positive development. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a common strategic tool and management practice adopted by companies in crisis situations (Ham & Kim, 1991; Donaldson & Preston, 1995). Also, socially responsible actions foster meaningful long-term development and advance social good or welfare (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012; Greening & Turban, 2000). Thus, CSR has become a strategic tool for sustaining competitive advantage, enhancing brand reputation, and encouraging employee organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). CSR research has received significant attention for the hotel sector. Employee perceptions of hotel CSR has been found to have a fundamental impact on job engagement, job satisfaction, commitment, and OCB (Wang, Hu, & Zhang, 2020). In crisis situations, a good CSR reputation has a risk buffering effect (Donaldson & Preston, 1995), which assists hotels in maintaining good relationships with internal and external stakeholders (e.g., employees, customers, suppliers, and residents). Moreover, CSR can assist in mitigating crisis damage, obtaining customer forgiveness, reshaping corporate image, and achieving sustainability. Thus, it is critical to investigate and manage hotel CSR especially when threats to operations and survival are at the highest levels such as with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The effect and consequences of CSR can be grouped into the macro- and micro-levels. The majority of CSR research has considered CSR as a macro-level phenomenon with macro-level consequences (firm outcomes) including financial performance, corporate reputation, short-term profitability, and revenues (Brammer & Millington, 2008; Brammer & Pavelin, 2006; Inoue & Lee, 2011). There is increasing yet limited empirical research on the micro-level consequences (individual outcomes) of CSR (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012); for example, on how CSR predicts employee and customer trust, satisfaction and citizenship behavior (Kim, Rhou, Uysal, & Kwon, 2017; Kim, Yin, & Lee, 2020; Luo & Bhattacharya, 2006). Although hotels are not so-called “irresponsible corporations”, such as sinful industries, hotel occupations are often characterized by highly-intensive physical, intellectual, and emotional labor (Chen, Chang, & Wang, 2019), thereby readily producing lower engagement and higher turnover rates among hotel employees (Farrington, Curran, & Gori, 2017; Xie, Zhang, Chen, Morrison, & Lin, 2020). In addition, the career prospects and social status of hotel employment tend to have a dubious “social stigma” (Powell & Watson, 2006). Accordingly, CSR in hotels has become an important issue for academic researchers and industry practitioners. Wang et al. (2020) investigated the CSR practices of international hotel chains operating in China, and a validated CSR scale with four dimensions (environmental protection, employee wellness, business ethics, and customer wellness) was developed. CSR's effects on employee job engagement, job satisfaction, commitment, and OCB were examined. In addition, Kim et al. (2017) proposed that CSR positively predicted employees' quality of working life, affective commitment, OCB, and job performance. The hotel industry has among the major applications of CSR practices (Farrington et al., 2017). For example, many Chinese hotels launched activities and projects to meet “green hotel” standards, including adopting energy-efficient bulbs, reducing disposable items, and employing reusable items, thereby reducing operating costs and building environmentally-friendly corporate images (Peng, Wei, & Li, 2013). In addition, internal CSR programs concerned with employee welfare are being adopted by hotel corporations. CSR has become a popular topic in hospitality research, and employee perceptions of hotel CSR practices are being increasingly regarded as a basic factor in determining their attitudes, behavior, and performance.

However, within CSR, three key research gaps still exist. First, there is an absence of adequate empirical research on hotel CSR in crisis situations. Crisis events and their consequences bring unavoidable challenges for all corporations, and appear to be having disastrous negative impacts on service industries including hotels (Zhang, Xie, Wang, Morrison, & Andres, 2020). Thus, it has become a critical research issue as well as strategic need for hotel companies to responsibly cope with crises, exhibit social and human care, and achieve sustainability during major crises. The research about hotel CSR under abnormal circumstances is still limited. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic is considered to be a uniquely impactful incident as well as a major public health crisis in world history (Fong et al., 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected the sustainability of the hospitality industry at the macro level and normal operations at the micro level (Zenker & Kock, 2020; Zhang et al., 2020). The first research gap, therefore, is the relative paucity of investigations on the effect of hotel CSR during COVID-19.

Second, there is a debate over the impact of CSR on employee attitudes and behaviors. Academics believe that CSR positively predicts employee job performance and OCB, and this conclusion has been tested in hospitality (Wang et al., 2020). Paradoxically however, some scholars suggest that although CSR practices make frontline employees “feel good”, these sentiments are intangible and have no direct influence on employee practices. For example, it is argued that corporate philanthropy is unlikely to produce observable changes in employee behavior and performance beyond those that can be produced by monetary incentives (Karnani, 1991; Dewhurst, Guthridge, & Mohr, 2009). Moreover, CSR practices sometimes have even resulted in reverse consequences (Aguinis & Glavas, 2013; Webb & Mohr, 1998). To date, the effects of CSR on employee safety behavior have not been examined. Thus, empirical research of CSR's impacts on behavioral outcomes will help to inform this debate. In addition, hotel employee safety behavior is a basic factor affecting corporate safety performance and sustainable development during a major health crisis pandemic (Zhang et al., 2020). Therefore, it is even more crucial for hotels to promote employee safety behavior during major crises; however, relevant research about employee safety behavior during major health crises is still limited.

Third, the boundary conditions and synergistic factors for CSR on employee safety behavior during a crisis situation lack empirical investigation. Employees endeavor to protect their valuable resources from external threats in crisis situations. A major crisis presents a threat to valuable resources, such as physical infection, unemployment, and psychological stress. To minimize loss of resources, employees may drop out from work or events which further consume their resources. Safety behavior, such as complying with safety policies, participating in safety activities, helping others with safety issues, and promoting a climate of safety, require employees to invest a great deal of time and energy to maintain workplace safety and may be considered to erode their resources (Guo, Liu, Chu, Ye, & Zhang, 2019). Thus, psychological resources are severely depleted in crisis situations, having a negative impact on employee resource depletion behavior (e.g., safety behavior). Importantly, belief restoration and negative emotions are the positive and negative psychological states and emotional experiences commonly possessed by employees in high-risk workplaces and crisis contexts (Fong et al., 2020). According to Hobfoll (1991), resources refer to things that make individuals feel valuable and can be categorized into object (e.g., cars, housing), conditional (e.g., friends, power), personal characteristic (e.g., self-belief, self-esteem), and energy resources (e.g., energy, technical ability). Therefore, it can be seen that belief restoration and negative emotions reflect the positive and negative aspects of employee resources in a crisis, and may impact their safety-related decision-making (Lau, Griffiths, Au, & Choi, 2011; Liu-Lastres, Schroeder, & Pennington-Gray, 2019). However, the moderation effects of belief restoration and negative emotions on CSR and employee safety behavior lack clear and systematic research. The effects of hotel CSR on employee behavior needs to be analyzed across more cases and with differing contexts and outcome variables.

To address the above gaps, and with the background of the COVID-19 pandemic, this research aimed to explore the impacts of CSR on employee safety behavior, as well as investigating the moderating effects of employee belief restoration and negative emotions. This research attempts to make three major contributions. First, based on a pandemic crisis and within a hospitality context, it explores the effects of CSR, providing a new perspective and application for CSR research. Second, by focusing on corporate philanthropy, the research is the first to investigate the impacts of hotel CSR on employee safety behavior based on social-influence theories, addressing the theoretical debate about the effect of CSR on employee behaviors. Third, drawing on the resource conservation perspective, this research determines the moderating effects and boundary conditions between CSR-safety behavior links, extending the application of CoR theory in hospitality safety and pandemic crises. New insights are provided as well as a theoretical basis for hotels in adopting CSR practices, establishing safety behavior systems, and promoting recovery from a major public health crisis.

Section snippets

Corporate social responsibility (CSR)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be defined as the consistent commitment of companies to ethical practices, economic development, and the improvement of the quality of life of employees and society as a whole (Kim, Rhou, Topcuoglu, & Kim, 2020). CSR mainly reflects the roles and functions of corporations as market and legal subjects in society, their relationships with society, and contributions to and influence upon society (Liu, Li, & Yang, 2017). Now, some similar concepts are

Direct effect of CSR on employee safety behavior

Social exchange and identity theories are widely adopted to explain the impact of CSR on employee positive work behaviors (Bavik, 2019). Drawing upon social identity theory, Shen and Benson (2016) proposed that CSR positively predicted employee task performance and extra-role helping behavior through the mediation of organizational identification. Liu et al. (2017) and Kim et al. (2017) investigated the positive impact of CSR on employee OCB based on social exchange theory. Employee safety

Research background

In December 2019, several COVID-19 cases were diagnosed in Wuhan. As of January2021, The cumulative number of confirmed cases exceeded 90,000 in China, and more than 55,000,000 globally (World Health Organization, 2020). Hotels are public places with intensive people use, and hotel service is characterized by interactions between staff and guests. Since COVID-19 can be spread through respiratory droplets, physical contact and aerosols, most hotels were fully or partially closed, some hotels

Common method variance (CMV)

To avoid the CMV in data collection, some items were set in the reverse direction, anonymity was assured, and it was highlighted that there were no absolutely right or wrong answers. After the data were collected, a Harman's single-factor test was conducted by including all items for principal component analysis without rotation. The results showed that the KMO value of the questionnaire was 0.917, and six components with eigenvalues greater than one were extracted, and the first component

Conclusions

Based on social-influence theories, this research explored the effect of hotel CSR on employee safety behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. The moderation effects of employee belief restoration and negative emotions were investigated based on CoR theory. The main conclusions were as follows:

First, hotel CSR positively predicted employee safety behavior. The empirical results showed that hotel CSR had a positive impact on safety compliance, participation, and adaptation. This conclusion was

Funding

Supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (Grant No. 19YJAZH097)

National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41971182).

Declaration of competing interest

No conflict of interest.

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  • Cited by (0)

    1

    His research interests include safety and security in tourism and hospitality management.

    2

    His research interests include safety and security in tourism, smart tourism and hospitality management.

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