Interpersonal relationship stress refers to any potential negative relationship involving a variety of conflicts and misunderstandings in any interaction between a member and other organizational members or customers when in-house members carry out th...
Interpersonal relationship stress refers to any potential negative relationship involving a variety of conflicts and misunderstandings in any interaction between a member and other organizational members or customers when in-house members carry out their given tasks and achieve their organizational goals. Recently, however, such interpersonal relationship stress has been highlighted as a serious personal and social issue because it often involves psychological frustrations, lower working mindset, turnover intention, and even physical diseases. For the hotel businessfocusing on personal services and interactions with co-workers in particular, interpersonal relationship stress affects employees' job satisfaction and organizational commitment, possibly resulting in the lower quality of services available for customers vis-a-vis fallen reputation. On the other hand, corresponding customer dissatisfactions and claims may lead to fewer opportunities for customers to revisit the hotel considering the negative effects on the management results of the hotel. Thus, this study investigated how the interpersonal relationship stress of hotel business employees (supervisors, subordinates, co-workers, and customers) affects the working mindset (job satisfaction, organizational commitment) and turnover intention. It also sought to find out whether satisfaction with in-house communication as a moderating variable of interpersonal relationship stress may serve to moderate the working mindset and turnover intention. To meet these goals, this study came up with the following research model:
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To demonstrate the research model, a total of 334 questionnaires collected from employees working for 13 domestic hotels (Seoul, Daegu, Busan, and Gyeongju areas) were used to perform structural equation model analysis and verify the hypotheses. The results revealed a correlation between higher interpersonal relationship stress and lower job satisfaction and organizational commitment as well as higher turnover intention. Note that customer relationship stress had significant effects on job satisfaction and organizational commitment, whereas supervisor/customer relationship stress was closely correlated with higher turnover intention. Moreover, higher job satisfaction was found to be associated with stronger organizational commitment and lower turnover intention. Thus, job satisfaction can be said to be a crucial leading variable affecting organizational commitment, which in turn is a crucial leading variable affecting turnover intention. Supervisor/co-worker/customer relationship stress was found to have effects on reducing job satisfaction and organizational commitment thus creating a potential path to higher turnover intention and another path to lower job satisfaction and organizational commitment to higher turnover intention. In addition, the higher the association of supervisor/co-worker relationship stress with lower satisfaction with in-house communication is, the higher the association of satisfaction with in-house communication with higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment but lower correlation with turnover intention.
For the possible moderating effects on satisfaction with in-house communication, satisfaction with in-house communication was found to minimize the negative effects between co-worker/subordinate/customer relationship stress and job satisfaction as well as between subordinate/customer relationship stress and organizational commitment. Moderating effects in terms of reducing the positive effects between subordinate/customer relationship stress and turnover intention were also noted.
These findings provide the opportunity to think about the need for establishing possible ways of managing interpersonal relationship stress. In terms of the original characteristics of the hotel business in particular, the findings demonstrate the foremost consequence of customer relationship stress management. To date, most of the previous research studies tended to overlook the importance of in-house communication. In contrast, this study proves that in-house communication serves as a very crucial variable in interpersonal relationship stress, job satisfaction, organizational commitment,and turnover intention. As such, this study is meaningful because it proposes in-house communication as a methodological part of organizational management hence the need for follow-up studies to establish more realistic and diversified methods of managing interpersonal relationship stress by factor (supervisors, customers, co-workers, and subordinates) and facilitate in-house communication effectively.