酒店员工职场孤独感对职场偏差行为的影响——一项体验取样研究

The Effect of Hotel Employees’Workplace Loneliness on Workplace Deviant Behavior:An Experience Sampling Method Study

虽然我国酒店行业取得了高速发展,但在员工管理方面陆续暴露出系列问题,如职场偏差行为的频频发生。鉴于此,该研究拟探索酒店员工职场偏差行为的诱发因素,以期为酒店如何干预或抑制职场偏差行为提供理论启发。文章认为,酒店员工的职场孤独感是职场偏差行为的心理动因。基于自我损耗理论,职场孤独感会消耗个体的自我调节资源(即出现自我损耗),削弱个体的自我控制能力,从而增加了职场偏差行为的可能性。上述现象在低道德型领导情境下更容易出现,但在高道德型领导情境下能得到有效抑制。该研究采用体验取样法,对酒店基层员工进行连续5个工作日的问卷调查,结果表明:(1)酒店员工职场孤独感正向影响职场偏差行为;(2)自我损耗在职场孤独感与职场偏差行为之间起中介作用;(3)直属上司的道德型领导风格削弱了自我损耗与职场偏差行为的正向关系,以及职场孤独感与职场偏差行为之间经由自我损耗的间接效应。以上结果对于理解职场偏差行为的成因以及应对措施具有启发意义。

The hospitality industry is growing at a rapid pace in China.While its explosive growth has meant positive outlooks,it has also resulted in unintended consequences.An ongoing challenge for hotel management is employees’deviant behaviors in the workplace,which are defined as intentional and spontaneous behaviors that violate organizational rules and harm the interests of organizations and their members.Prototypical workplace deviant behaviors include stealing public property,misappropriating public funds,and delaying work.Workplace deviant behaviors waste organizational resources and damage organizational reputation,which,in the long term,can engender huge economic losses for hotels.As such,how to predict and intervene in deviant behavior has come to be seen as a significant concern by hotel managers and has become an emerging topic in management scholarship.As noted by previous research,irrational and deviant behaviors arise as a consequence of employees’negative emotions.However,prior research has mainly focused on an overall negative emotion while neglecting some specific negative emotions.This limitation prevents us from obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the antecedents of workplace deviant behavior.To address this issue,this study proposes that employees’workplace loneliness is an important facilitator of their workplace deviant behavior,and ego depletion acts as a mediator to explain the above relationship.In addition,ethical leadership can mitigate the relationship between ego depletion and workplace deviant behavior as well as the indirect effect of workplace loneliness on workplace deviant behavior via ego depletion.To test the proposed moderated mediation model,this study adopted the experience sampling approach and surveyed hotel employees for 5 continuous working days in the Chinese hotel industry.Data were analysed using multilevel modelling in Mplus 7.The results show that(1)workplace loneliness exerts a positive effect on workplace deviant behavior;(2)ego depletion mediates the relationship between workplace loneliness and workplace deviant behavior;(3)ethical leadership negatively moderates the direct relationship between ego depletion and workplace deviant behavior such that ego depletion is weakly(strongly)related to workplace deviant behaviors when ethical leadership is low(high);and(4)ethical leadership negatively moderates the indirect relationship between workplace loneliness and workplace deviant behavior via ego depletion such that the indirect effect is weak(versus strong)when ethical leadership is high(versus low).Thus,all our hypotheses are empirically supported by the multiwave and multisource data.This study has several implications for theory and practice.Theoretically,this study highlights the role of workplace loneliness in predicting workplace deviant behaviors,thereby contributing to our insights into the antecedents of workplace deviant behavior.By introducing the mediating role of ego depletion and the moderating role of ethical leadership,this study deepens our knowledge about the mechanism linking workplace loneliness and deviant behaviors.Practically,this study indicates that hotel managers should provide more opportunities for friendly communication among employees to reduce their workplace loneliness.Moreover,moral leadership is a potential external factor for mitigating the negative influence of workplace loneliness on deviant behaviors.Therefore,managing employees in a moral manner may be a wise choice for hotel managers.