Understanding hotel employees’ service sabotage: Emotional labor perspective based on conservation of resources theory

Although hospitality employees’ service sabotage behavior in service encounters is not only, more seriously prevailed than generally presumed but also detrimental to the organizations’ growth, and profitability, the topic has not been a major topic in hospitality research. Thus, this study aims to, provide answers to the questions “Why do hospitality employees engage in service sabotage, behaviors?” and “What can hospitality organizations do to mitigate them?” Based on conservation of, resources (COR) theory, we hypothesized hospitality employees’ emotional labor, specifically, emotional dissonance, to be a major source of service sabotage. We also hypothesized burnout to have, a mediating effect, while emotional intelligence has a buffering effect on the mediated relationship, between emotional dissonance and service sabotage via burnout. The results of moderated mediation, regression analyses of the data from 309 customer-contact hotel employees in the U.S. supported all, the hypotheses in this study. The implications of the findings and future research directions were, discussed.