Abstract
The prevalent trends of sustainability and responsible management have promoted corporate social responsibility (CSR) to attract considerable research and business interest. However, despite its importance, few efforts have been exerted to develop a standardized CSR scale in the hotel industry. This study aims to develop and validate a multidimensional scale of hotel CSR measurement as perceived by hotel staff who understands CSR. Results of running factor analyses generate a five-factor structure. The overall measurement model demonstrates a satisfactory level of goodness-of-fit and supports convergent validity, discriminate validity, nomological validity, and predictive validity. The legal domain received the highest mean score among the five hotel CSR domains, followed by ethical, financial/economic, environmental, and social/philanthropic domains. The value on employee attitude toward the CSR-implementing hotel, employee satisfaction with the CSR-implementing hotel, and organizational commitment toward the CSR-implementing hotel varied between front-of-house and back-of-house employees. This validated measurement scale is recommended for future studies to explore the effect of hotel CSR in various countries or regions.
1. Introduction
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) refers to the manner, of how a company operates its business and assumes responsibility for its effect on the society. CSR covers diverse aspects such as financial sustainability, legal compliance, ethical standard, and environmental and social impacts (Carroll, 1991; Castka et al., 2004). CSR strategies exhibit a significant and positive effect on financial performance (Garay and Font, 2012).
6. Contributions and limitations
This study contributes to existing hospitality literature. First, this study developed a hotel CSR instrument through meticulous and rigorous six-stage procedures. In the first stage to define dimensions and items within each domain, most studies on CSR were thoroughly reviewed and in-depth interviews with hotel CSR experts were conducted. Noting industrial or social trends, environmental and social/philanthropic domain were included to conceptualize the hotel CSR. The dimensional structure of hotel CSR was confirmed by checking the diversity of reliability or validity. Moreover, the CSR scale was proven to be effective in predicting the employee attitude, employee satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Thus, this scale could be used to explain other outcome variables, such as loyalty to the hotel, pro-social behavior, post-purchase behavior, and brand loyalty. Therefore, the results of this study could help create new knowledge and extend to subsequent research.
