The effect of economic anxiety and occupational burnout levels of tour guides on their occupational commitment

A tour guide is a person, who guides domestic and foreign tourists, who provides accurate information about the destinations visited within the scope of the tour programs, and who ensures that the tourists have an accurate social, economic, and cultural impressions about that specific region or country. Efficient fulfillment of the functions of the tour guides depends on the fact that their occupational commitment levels are high and occupational burnout and economic concern levels are low. This study aims to reveal the effects of economic concern and occupational burnout levels of active (certified) tour guides in Turkey on their occupational commitment. For this purpose, a face-to-face and online (through e-mails and social media) survey was conducted on 370 active tour guides, who were determined through stratified sampling method. Descriptive statistics of this research and the relationships between the variables were analyzed through SPSS 22.00 program; the path analysis, which was built through confirmatory factor analyses and structural equation modeling, was performed through AMOS 22.00 program. At the end of this analysis, the occupational commitment and economic concern levels of tour guides were found to be high, and the level of occupational burnout was found to be low. A negative relation was found between the occupational commitment and burnout levels of tour guides and a strong positive relation was found between the occupational burnout and economic concern levels; it was also observed that the economic concern level only had a slight positive impact on occupational commitment and its continuance commitment dimension. Keywords: Tour guide, Occupational commitment, Burnout, Economic anxiety,Turkey.