The Effect of Human Resources Quality on Guests Loyalty of The Star Hotels in East Kalimantan Province - Indonesia

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of interpersonal trust, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment of front line employees on guest loyalty through organizational citizenship behavior and service quality in hotel industry. The conceptual framework of the study consists of the following constructs: interpersonal trust, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behavior, service quality, and guest loyalty. Moreover, 6 hypotheses were developed and tested. Pearson correlation and Cronbach Alpha were used to test the validity and reliability of measurements, while PLS was used in hypotheses testing. Data were collected from 460 guests who had recently visited a hotel and another 230 front-line employees such as receptionists, cashiers, bellboys, doormans, and telephone operators from 46 star hotels in East Kalimantan Province who completed the self-administered questionnaire.

The results of this study reveal that interpersonal trust has a significant effect on organizational citizenship behavior, job satisfaction has a significant effect on organizational citizenship behavior, organizational citizenship behavior significantly affects the service quality, and service quality has a significant effect on guest loyalty. In contrast, organizational commitment is unrelated to organizational citizenship behavior and organizational citizenship behavior is unrelated to guest loyalty. This study provides important support to the service-profit chain model. The study found that internal quality such as organizational citizenship behavior is a strong factor to build guest loyalty through service quality. While organizational citizenship behavior is strongly influenced by interpersonal trust and employees satisfaction. Conversely, organizational commitment fails to influence organizational citizenship behavior. The commitment of front-line hotel employees to the company is strongly determined by continuance commitment, where employees are committed to the company because of there is no more jobs they could find. In the other words, they have a strong barrier to exit from the company such as age barrier, opportunities barrier, and ability barrier.

Keywords: Interpersonal Trust, Job Satisfaction, Organizational Commitment, Organizational Citizenship Behavior, Service Quality, Guest Loyalty