Workplace Environment, Leader Communication and Hotel Employee Retention: Job Satisfaction as a Mediator

Every organisation has invested its time, effort and resources to recruit, train and pay employees’ salaries. These investments are important to ensure that the organisation can produce high-quality employees who will remain with the organisation for a long period of time and be part of the successful members of the service team. Although a lot has been done to ensure that employees remain with the organisation, research has found that employee retention remains to be a problem to most organisations. In validating whether the findings from past studies are still consistent with the present situation, the present research aims to further investigate whether work environment, leader communication and job satisfaction still present significant relationships with hotel employee retention. In total, 550 self-administered questionnaires were distributed to hotel employees attached to 3-star and 4-star hotels located in Klang Valley, Malaysia. Of the total being distributed, 329 were returned and considered usable for data analysis. The hypothesised relationships between variables were tested using the multiple regression analysis. The findings reveal that workplace environment, leader communication and job satisfaction are significantly related to hotel employee retention. The results also demonstrate that job satisfaction mediates the relationship between workplace environment, leader communication and employee retention. The findings of this research advance the understanding of employee retention and create awareness among hotel management to better appreciate the dimensions of transformation which are essential towards ensuring employee job satisfaction. This will consequently lead to a long-term employee retention. Apart from the findings, the paper also highlights the limitations and suggestions for future research. Keywords: Workplace environment, leader communication, job satisfaction, employee retention, hotel industry.

The New Normal Leadership: How Technology Alter Communication Style in Contemporary Organization

The Covid-19 pandemic has hit many sectors in the world. To mitigate the plague, many countries have formulated a social distancing policy. The pandemic compels us to foster the use of technology to carry out daily activities. A very few articles explain how technology alters the way leaders communicate. Therefore, the objective of this research is to examine whether technology has an impact on leader communication patterns using Adaptive Leadership and Technological Determinism Theory. This research uses qualitative approach with literature review and interview as a means to collect and analyze data. Based on the current trend, there are some changes in leader communication patterns. Also, the author found that there is a gap in the adoption of technology between leaders and members of the organization. While leaders are prepared to change mindset and embrace digital practices, members are not well-prepared. They struggle to adjust to the new work environment and feel overworked and exhausted. To embrace the digital working environment, leaders need to solve the gap. We argue that the gap between the leaders and members can be addressed by enhancing or improving the way leaders and members interact. This is because to become a leader, one should engage in communication. We propose some principles about new ways of communication during the New Normal.

Sound and Safe: The Role of Leader Motivating Language and Follower Self-Leadership in Feelings of Psychological Safety

This manuscript presents a study on how leader motivating language and follower self-leadership act to influence a follower’s feelings of psychological safety. This study found that both constructs significantly influenced psychological safety in samples from India and the USA. Additionally, this study found that this influence occurred through the mediating processes of trust in leadership, leader inclusiveness, and role clarity. These mediators fully explained motivating language’s relationship with psychological safety, but only partially explained self-leadership’s relationship. Differences existed in the model between samples, but self-leadership showed an overall consistency between the samples for most relationships. Follow-up analysis indicated that self-leadership without leader communication support lead to a weak or non-existent relationship between self-leadership and psychological safety, but a positive and relatively strong relationship in the presence of motivating language.

Leader Communication and Follower Identity: How Leader Motivating Language Shapes Organizational Identification through Cultural Knowledge and Fit

This study examines the links between leader communication (as conceptualized through motivating language) and follower organizational identification as mediated by follower cultural knowledge and fit. Results show that motivating language has a positive and strong effect on follower organizational identification with a one standard deviation increase in motivating language corresponding to over a half of a standard deviation increase in follower organizational identification. This influence comes partly through growth in a follower’s cultural knowledge and fit, but also through a direct influence. Model testing occurred with subjects from the USA and India with the model fitting equally well in both nations. These findings have important implications for research and practice which are explained in the paper’s discussion and conclusion section.