Summary of employee commitment

Employee commitment is a significant consideration for organisations that can influence the growth of a business, particularly in service industries such as hospitality where employees are an important part of customer satisfaction.

40 Employee commitment as shown by the previous literature can be divided into various forms with the focus here on the three foci of organisational commitment, employee commitment to the customer and career commitment.

Organisational commitment refers to the desire of employees in the organisation to achieve the goals and objectives of the organisation, on behalf of the organisation. Secondly, employee commitment to customers refers to employee desires to achieve a level of service that reaches the goals of customer expectations. Employee commitment to customers leads to increased levels of service quality. Career commitment is the commitment to a particular type of work that has increasing benefits to the employee.

The three types of employee commitment mentioned above are significant for this current study in providing clarity to the role of employee commitment in the hospitality industry. In turn, the typology of organisational commitment is divided into three components (Allen & Meyer 1990) including affective commitment which refers to the employee‘s emotional attachment to, involvement in, identification with the organisation; continuance commitment which refers to employees remaining in the employment of an organisation for a longer period due to accumulated investments; and normative commitment which reflects a feeling of obligation by the employee to continued employment with a particular organisation.

2.3 Culture

In order to understand the relationship between hotel employee commitment and human cultural difference, the concept of culture and its influence on employee commitment needs clarification. However, it needs to be stated that there is very little literature on the direct relationship between employee commitment and culture. Consequently, it is first necessary to examine the issue of cultural difference in a general sense, and in particular, in relation to Thai and Australian employees, which are the subject of this research. This section begins by examining the definition of culture and cultural difference.

41 2.3.1 The Definition of Culture

Culture can be defined in various ways (Srnka 2004). Because culture is a complex multi- dimensional phenomenon, it can be classified into seven categories reflecting aspects of the diffuse concept of culture defined by Bodley (1994, p.9) as presented in Table 2.2.

Table 2.2: Diversity of culture definitions adapted from Bodley (1994)

Concept Definition Scholars

Topical Culture consists of everything on a list of topics, or categories, such as social organisation, religion and economy.

Hofstede (1991); Keesing (1974).

Historical Culture is social heritage, or tradition, that is passed on to future generations.

Kluckhohn (1958).

Behavioural Culture is shared, learned human behaviour; a way of life.

Harris (1968); Harris & Moram (1979); Herbig (1998).

Normative Culture is ideals, values, or rules for living. Tylor(1871); Triandis (1972).

Functional Culture is the way humans solve problems by adapting to the environment or living together.

Hofstede (1980)

Mental Culture is a complex set of ideas, or learned habits, that inhibit impulses and distinguish people from animals.

Triandis (1972); Potter (1989); Wallerstein (1990). Structural Culture consists of patterned and interrelated ideas,

symbols, or behaviours.

Barnlund & Araki (1985).

Symbolic Culture is based on arbitrarily assigned meanings that are shared by a society.

Kim & Gudykunst (1988); Ferraro (1994).

According to Reisinger and Turner (2003), culture is a complicated multidimensional phenomenon, and a broad concept that is difficult to define. Consequently, researchers

42 in different fields have their own definitions of culture relating to their interests. Because it is difficult to provide an holistic definition of culture, Hofstede (1980) stated that ―culture is like a black box which we know is there but not what it contains‖ (p.13). As mentioned in Table 2.2, there are various concepts of culture defined and applied by previous scholars including topical, historical, behavioural, normative, functional, mental, structural and symbolic and several definitions are provided.

One definition from Herbig (1998, p.11), is that culture is ―the sum of a way of life, including expected behaviour, beliefs, values, language and living practices shared by members of a society. It consists of both explicit and implicit rules through which experience is interpreted‖. Pizam (1999, p.393) suggests that ―culture is an umbrella word that encompasses a whole set of implicitly, widely shared beliefs, traditions, values, and expectations that characterise a particular group of people‖.

However, there are some studies exploring the relationship between values, beliefs, attitude and behaviour (Sommer et al. 1996). Leiserowitz et al. (2006) argues that values have a positive impact on attitude and behaviour in sustaining culture. Therefore, from studies such as these it could be said that values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviour in certain cultures influence the individual level of satisfaction in a society. Porter (1994) went further saying that knowledge of one‘s own values and beliefs and awareness of others‘ values and beliefs will determine the capacity of people to share meanings.

The literature also explains that there are different levels of cultural definition from broad national cultures to subcultures within nations, and even to industry or professional cultures (Schneider & Barsoux 1997). As such, the hospitality sector is more customer-oriented than many other service sectors such as finance or accounting, while professions develop a culture of their own in the workplace, such as medical workers or lawyers.

In this research there is no attempt to move to the finer levels of culture such as subcultures or professional cultures, but to remain fundamentally at the level of national

43 cultures and examine how they are reflected in the hospitality industry as a hospitality culture in the workplace, and specifically how they influence employee commitment in the hospitality industry.