Management commitment to service quality, job embeddedness, and performance outcomes: A study of hotel employees in Romania

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this thesis is to develop and test a conceptual model that examines the relationships among management commitment to service quality, job embeddedness, and performance outcomes. Training, empowerment, and rewards are the indicators of management commitment to service quality. Service recovery performance and extra-role customer service are the performance variables. The aforementioned relationships were tested via data obtained from employees in the four- and five-star hotels in the Poiana Brasov region in Romania using hierarchical multiple regression analysis. These hotel employees are the ones having intense face-to-face or voice-to-voice interactions with customers. According to the results of the study, training, empowerment, and rewards have significant positive effects on job embeddedness. Empowerment and rewards enhance service recovery performance, while training has no significant effect on service recovery performance. The results of this study demonstrate that training and empowerment increase extra-role performance, while rewards are not significantly related to extra-role performance. Employees who are embedded in the job have better service recovery performance. However, this is not valid for the relationship between job embeddedness and extra-role customer service. The results also demonstrate that empowerment and rewards influence service recovery performance directly and indirectly through job embeddedness. In addition, management implications are provided based on the results of the study, and information regarding the limitations of the study as well as implications for future research is presented in the thesis.