Guest editorial: The past, present and future of hospitality research

Citation

Guchait, P. and Ann, S. (2022), "Guest editorial: The past, present and future of hospitality research", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 34 No. 8, pp. 2801-2806. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-08-2022-062

Welcome to IJCHM’s special issue on The Past, Present, and Future of Hospitality Research. I would like to specially thank our guest editors Dr Priyanko Guchait and Dr SaeHya Ann for putting together this very strong and timely special issue. The articles included in this special issue should be well received by scholars, students and practicing managers in our field.

Fevzi Okumus

Editor-in-Chief

Introduction

About West Federation CHRIE research hackathon initiative

West Federation CHRIE (WF CHRIE) is the western region chapter of the International Council on Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Education. The 2021 WF CHRIE conference initiated and organized the inaugural Research Hackathon, collaborating with the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management (IJCHM). The goal of the Research Hackathon was to bring together hospitality researchers with diverse skills, knowledge and perspectives to maximize collaboration and create novel scientific research. The current special issue is an attempt to build on that idea. As such, we invited scholars from all across the globe to form their own teams with diverse researchers and submit novel scientific research in the area of hospitality and tourism.

Purpose

The purpose of this special issue was to bring together the state-of-the-art research that has meaningful and significant implications for researchers and practitioners in the hospitality and tourism industry. The scope of this special issue is broad – The Past, Present and Future of Hospitality Research. As such, the papers fell under one or more of these three broad segments:

1. Past: meta-analysis and systematic literature review.

2. Present: contemporary research, current trends and issues.

3. Future: research topics, designs, methods and data analysis of the future.

The special issue includes studies about hospitality and tourism that involve:

• application/integration of theories from various disciplines such as leadership, management, psychology, organizational studies, marketing, finance, technology, tourism and hospitality;

• development of new constructs and/or measurement scales;

• longitudinal/time-based data collection;

• data collection from multiple sources (leaders, followers and customers; secondary data);

• use of multiple sample/studies in one paper to validate findings;

• use of multiple research designs (experimental, field studies);

• multilevel studies (organizational, team/group and individual);

• research based on grants;

• conditional analysis (mediators and moderators);

• research based on collaboration with other disciplines (inclusion of coauthors from other departments such as engineering, technology, management, psychology and others for wider dissemination of the research findings); and

• systematic literature reviews and meta-analysis.

As such, several research gaps were identified and addressed in this special issue.

The papers in this special issue

This special issue contains 16 papers that cover a broad range of issues in hospitality and tourism research including systematic literature reviews, diverse data collection methods and analysis techniques, a number of research designs and contemporary research topics from various disciplines. The papers in this special issue provide a comprehensive overview and insights about the role and importance of research in hospitality and tourism. Next, we present brief summaries of the papers in the special issue.

In the paper titled “Customers’ perceptions of hotel AI-enabled voice assistants: Does brand matter,” Ruiying et al. (2022) proposed an integrative model of the brand of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled voice assistants (AI-EVA), customers’ perceptions and behavioral intentions using a mixed method approach. Study 1 involved a qualitative method to explore customers’ experience with AI-EVA. An experimental design was used in Study 2 to examine the effects of the brand of AI-EVA and construal level on customer outcomes. Finally, Study 3 examined how the brand of AI-EVA and hotel scale affect customers’ perceptions and behavioral intentions of using AI-EVA during hotel stays.

The paper by Lee et al. (2022) titled “What is my calling? An exploratory mixed-methods approach to conceptualizing hospitality career calling” provided important insights in advancing the hospitality workforce by exploring dimensions of calling. Using a qualitative approach, Study 1 identified transcendent summons, passion and purposeful life as significant dimensions of hospitality calling. Study 2 examined calling as a second-order construct and found significant influence on professional identity and intention to leave the industry.

In the next paper titled “Online food delivery research: A systematic literature review,” Shroff et al. (2022) conducted a tri-method study using systematic literature review, bibliometric and thematic content analysis of 43 articles on online food delivery (OFD) published in 24 journals from 2015 to 2021. Six potential research themes were identified. Moreover, four knowledge clusters were identified: digital mediation in OFD, dynamic OFD operations, OFD adoption by consumers and risk and trust issues in OFD. The paper also presented the emerging trends in terms of the most influential articles, authors and journals.

The paper by Liu et al. (2022) titled “A systematic review of work-family enrichment in the hospitality industry” used 23 studies on work–family enrichment (WFE) published from 2000 to 2021 and systematically analyzed the articles following the guidelines of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses. A framework was developed including the antecedents and outcomes of WFE at the organizational, job and individual levels. The study also identified the boundary conditions and theories used in WFE research.

In the next paper titled “Biophilic design for urban hotels – Prospective hospitality employees’ perspectives,” Guzzo et al. (2022) investigated the best and most holistic way of facilitating biophilic building design for prospective urban hotel employees. The study also examined the role of perceived well-being from nature attributes and how it influences employee emotions and willingness to work for a hotel with nature attributes. Data was collected from 436 respondents (through Prolific) who were actively searching for jobs and demonstrated interest to work for the hospitality industry. Using conjoint analysis, the study found that natural lighting, outdoor green views and indoor landscaping are important factors in the evaluation of an urban hotel with biophilic features. However, the tendencies varied when the sample was divided by prospective employees’ perceived well-being from nature attributes.

The paper by He et al. (2022) titled “Recovery experiences of wellness tourism and place attachment: Insights from feelings-as-information theory” examined the effect of recovery experience of wellness tourism on place attachment. The study also examined the mediating effect of self-perceived health and the moderating effect of health goal salience. The independent sample data was collected from wellness tourists in 2020 (N = 494) and 2021 (N = 978). SEM was used to test the mediation and moderation effects. Additionally, independent samples t-test and multigroup SEM analysis was conducted to compare the effects between 2020 and 2021. The study provided suggestions to the industry practitioners to improve experience-based management in wellness destinations.

In the next paper titled “Choreograph postpartum care experiencescapes in a resort setting,” Lin and Mattila (2022) applied the concept of holistic wellness to a postpartum care resort experiencescape to enhance women’s health and well-being. This conceptual paper addressed postpartum care in the USA and developed a conceptual model for designing postpartum care experiencescapes in a resort setting.

The paper by Yu et al. (2022) titled “Robots can’t take my job: Antecedents and outcomes of Gen Z employees’ service robot risk awareness” examined the moderating effect of transformational leadership on the indirect relationship between Gen Z employees’ tech-savviness and social skills on industry turnover intention through service robot risk awareness. The study collected two-wave time lagged multilevel data from 281 frontline hotel employees. The findings of the study can be used to implement training programs to ensure that employees and service robots successfully coexist in the workplace.

The paper by He et al. (2022) titled “Pride or empathy? Exploring effective CSR communication strategies on social media” investigated when and why featuring pride versus empathy in a hospitality brand’s social media post can effectively boost consumers’ loyalty intention. Using two experimental studies, this research found the congruence effects of emotional appeal and sense of power in CSR communications. Moreover, the study found the serial mediational roles of perceived brand authenticity and brand trustworthiness in relationship marketing on social media. The findings of the study can help hospitality marketers to creatively segment customers and curate appropriate targeting messages for effective CSR communications and relationship building on social media.

In the next paper titled “Daily spillover from home to work: The role of workplace mindfulness and daily customer mistreatment,” Shi and Wang (2022) examined the influence of daily poor sleep quality on employees’ emotional exhaustion at work through negative affect at home. Moreover, this study examined the moderating effect of day-level customer mistreatment and person-level workplace mindfulness in hotel frontline employees’ daily spillover from the home to work domain. Data was collected from 98 frontline hotel employees using an experience sampling method. The study included one-time initial survey and a ten-day daily diary study.

In the paper titled “Sustainability in hospitality and tourism: a review of key research topics from 1994–2020,” Molina-Collado et al. (2022) examined the scientific research related to sustainability in hospitality and tourism from 1994 to 2020 by conducting bibliometric and science mapping analyses. Keyword co-occurrences with 2,980 published papers collected from the Web of Science (SSCI and ESCI) were used for the bibliometric-based analysis. SciMAT software was used to offer relevant outputs such as research themes and graphical outcomes. The findings showed that biodiversity conservation, sustainable attitudes, climate change, protected areas, satisfaction and environmental management were the main motor-themes in the studied periods. Moreover, four future research areas were identified: sustainable behavior and environmental sustainability; consumption, demand and economic growth; tourism development and strategies; and rural tourism, poverty, ethics and education.

The paper by Leung et al. (2022) titled “Co-creating food experiences ‘delivered’ from iconic local restaurants” explored an emerging phenomenon of gourmet meal kits being delivered to out-of-towners from iconic local restaurants. Two online experimental studies involving 478 US customers were conducted to examine the underlying mechanism of customers’ decision-making on purchasing gourmet meal kits (Study 1) and visiting destination restaurants after receiving the meal kit (Study 2). The study found that intrinsic goal-framing leads to stronger intentions to purchase gourmet meal kits and to visit destination restaurants that see meal kits. Extrinsic goal-framing was found to enhance the positive influence of perceived relatedness and competence on behavioral intentions. Moreover, the study found that the effects of goal framing and basic needs on behavioral intentions was moderated by food involvement and mediated by experience cocreation to varying degrees.

In the next paper titled “Management commitment to the ecological environment, green work engagement and their effects on hotel employees’ green work outcomes,” Karatepe et al. (2022) proposed and tested a research framework in which green work engagement mediated the influence of management commitment to the ecological environment on green creativity, task-related environmental behavior (PEB) and proactive PEB. Data was collected from hotel customer-contact employees in Turkey and South Korea. The findings in both Study 1 and Study 2 supported the viability of the model.

The paper by Ghosh and Bhattacharya (2022) titled “Analyzing covid-19 impact on the financial performance of hospitality and tourism industries: An ensemble multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approach in the Indian context” focused on ranking 22 listed hotels and nine listed travel agencies in India based on their performance across 14 selected financial parameters in both the pre-COVID-19 year ending in March 2019 and the post-COVID-19 year ending in March 2021 to understand how the pandemic affected their businesses. Analysis was done using two recently developed MCDM techniques, MEREC (method based on the removal effects of criteria) and grey-based CoCoSo (combined compromised solution). The findings of the study can help with portfolio construction, corporate investment decisions, competition research, government policy-making and industrial analysis.

In the next paper titled “Building a thematic framework of identity research in hospitality organizations: A systematic literature review approach,” Ponting and Lee (2022) systematically reviewed and synthesized identity research in the hospitality management literature. A total of 55 articles published since 2000 were included in the review. The identity research in hospitality organizations were categorized into four themes: hospitality employee identities, diversity management and hospitality operations, identification-based approaches and hospitality organization identities. The study built an integrative thematic framework of identity research in hospitality and proposed directions for future research.

In the last paper titled “The antecedents of customer mistreatment: A meta-analytic review,” Liu et al. (2022) conducted a meta-analytic review to develop an overarching framework that identified the antecedents of customer mistreatment as well as potential boundary conditions. The study used 125 articles involving 141 independent samples. Three types of antecedents were identified: employees’ demographic factors, employees’ personality traits and contextual factors. Power distance culture and types of service industry were found to moderate some relationships.

Concluding remarks

This special issue attracted a large number of high-quality submissions from scholars within hospitality and tourism, as well as related disciplines. The articles in this special issue covered theories and topics from various areas including human resources, marketing, finance, leadership, organizational behavior, health, tourism and technology. A variety of research designs were used including survey design, experimental design, meta-analysis and systematic literature reviews. Several data analysis techniques were used such as partial least squares, structural equation modeling, regression, path analysis, multilevel modeling and conditional analysis to test for mediation and moderation. The studies included data from all over the world. The diversity of these studies is notable; and, collectively, they advance knowledge relevant to contemporary issues in hospitality and tourism.

There are many people to thank for their efforts on this issue. We would like to thank all the authors who responded to the call for articles. We are particularly grateful to the authors of the papers in the special issue and to the many anonymous reviewers who provided constructive suggestions and feedback. We would like to apologize to those we could not accommodate in this special issue. Finally, the studies presented in this special issue highlight the importance of continuing with research in hospitality and tourism. We hope that the papers in this special issue have taken a step toward recognizing this potential and will encourage more researchers to join this exciting research area.