The Role of Customer Related Social Stressors and Job Embeddedness on Employees’ Job Outcomes: An Empirical Study on Frontline Staff at Hotels in Nigeria

The study develops and tests a model that examines how customer related social stressors‘ influences job burnout among frontline hotel employees in Nigeria and their effect on job outcomes‘ using job embeddedness as a mediating effect. The data was collected through a self-administered questionnaire from a sample of frontline employees in the hotel sector. Nigeria as a developing country and the largest economy in Africa has gone through many transformations in the hotel sector, which makes the hospitality sector more reliable and contributing to the growth of the economy. The importance of frontline employees cannot be over emphasized as this study has identified that they are strong pillars of the Hotel industry in Nigeria. The SPSS 20 and SMART PLS 2.0 software packages were used for data entry and further analysis. The PLS analyses results show significant relationship and provide support for majority of the hypothesis setup according to extensive literature review. Specifically, Customer related social stressors have positive effect on job burnout except for verbal customer aggression that has negative effect on job burnout. The result also shows depersonalization and diminished personal accomplishment has negative effect on job embeddedness, while there was no significant relationship between emotional exhaustion and job embeddedness. Job Embeddedness has positive effect on customer orientation, job satisfaction and affective organization commitment was supported while job performance was not. However, the result shows that customer orientation, job performance and job satisfaction have negative effect on turnover intention, and no significant relationship was found between affective organization commitment and turnover intentions of frontline hotel employees in Nigeria. Managerial suggestions and future recommendations are offered. Keywords: Customer related social stressors, Burnout, Job embeddedness, Job outcomes, Frontline employees, Nigeria