Editorial

International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management

ISSN: 0959-6119

Article publication date: 4 February 2014

167

Citation

Okumus, F. (2014), "Editorial", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 26 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-11-2013-0492

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Volume 26, Issue 1

We proudly celebrated IJCHM’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 2013. Detailed information can be found about our activities and initiatives related to this milestone achievement at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/promo/ijchm_25.htm

In particular, we have initiated the preparation of two special issues. Leading authors in the hospitality and tourism field will contribute to both special issues. The first will be published during 2014 and the second will be published in 2015. These special issues will address key issues and challenges in the hospitality field and they should be well received by practitioners and scholars in the field. We would like to take this opportunity to thank again our subscribers, readers, authors, ad hoc reviewers, editorial board members, editorial assistants, regional editors, associate editors and managing editors from Emerald for their ongoing support and contribution to IJCHM.

Certainly, 2013 has been another very successful year for IJCHM. We are delighted to report the release of IJCHM’s second impact factor. According to the 2012 Journal Citation Reports®, announced in June 2013, IJCHM’s impact factor for 2012 was 1.266. This is indeed a great result, which further strengthens IJCHM’s position among the top journals in the hospitality and tourism field. Recognizing IJCHM’s progress in recent years, the Australian Business Deans Council has upgraded IJCHM to an A grade journal in 2013. Among Emerald’s 300 journals, IJCHM is been ranked third in terms of downloaded articles for the past seven years. We have been observing substantial increases in manuscript submissions to IJCHM. For example, we have received over 490 submissions so far in 2013 (as of November 1, 2013). Compared to receiving over 280 submissions in 2012, this number is indeed impressive and it is predicted that we may receive about 550 submissions by the end of 2013. Recognizing the increased number of manuscript submissions, starting from 2014, IJCHM will have eight issues per year. Moreover, Emerald has increased IJCHM’s pagination budget. This means that we will not only publish more articles but also longer articles in IJCHM.

In 2012 we announced that a strategic partnership had been reached between IJCHM and the Department of Hospitality and Service Management (DHSM) at Sun Yat-Sen University’s School of Business (SYSBS). Following this partnership agreement, IJCHM has now a second editorial office at SYSBS. I have so far visited SYSBS several times to deliver workshops and work on joint projects and publications with faculty members and PhD students from SYSBS. Professor Jingyan Liu, Professor Lishan Xie and Dr Xinyuan (Roy) Zhao have been working on a apecial issue related to ethical and sustainability issues in the tourism and hospitality industry in China. Professor Jingyan Liu, Professor Lishan Xie, Dr Xinyuan Zhao and other faculty members from SYSBS are now assisting me in reviewing manuscript submissions from China to IJCHM. We are indeed pleased that this innovative mode of academic partnership is working and beneficial for both IJCHM and SYSBS.

The first issue of IJCHM in 2014 contains eight research articles and two book reviews. In the first article, Peter Jones, David Hillier and Daphne Comfort provide an exploratory review of how the global hotel industry publicly communicates its approach to sustainability. By drawing materials from the world’s leading hotel chains’ corporate websites, this paper provides an accessible review of the sustainability agendas currently being pursued within the global hotel industry.

In the second article, Matthew Alexander, Euan Beveridge, Andrew MacLaren and Kevin O’Gorman explore the reaction of customer-facing staff and their attitude to the introduction of high-profile corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. The investigators conducted a series of site visits and interviews with managers and front line employees working within the licensed trade. The authors found that despite high levels of awareness of both the social problems relating to alcohol consumption and the legislative changes, engagement with operational CSR is limited and often disinterested. A new CSR implementation matrix is presented in this article, which allows hospitality businesses to be positioned according to levels of both management and employee engagement with CSR policies.

The third article, by Seoki Lee, Arun Upneja, Özgür Ozdemir and Kyung-A Sun, investigates the existence of a negative synergy effect of internationalization and firm size on firm performance for publicly traded US hotels. The study performed a two-way fixed-effects model to investigate the proposed negative synergy effect. The findings do not support the proposed negative synergy effect, but support the positive synergy effect of internationalization and firm size on performance, implicitly suggesting that the hotel’s monitoring cost in the international franchising context may not be severe as some expect.

The fourth paper, by Scott Swanson, Yinghua Huang and Baoheng Wang, provides a cross-cultural comparison of Chinese and American hospitality customers who report critical incidents and the resulting influences that these incidents and recovery efforts had on behavior. The study utilizes the critical incident technique in conjunction with a structured, self-administered questionnaire. The results demonstrate statistically significant cultural differences between American and Chinese consumers in terms of reported critical incident types, recovery approaches, and post-incident private voice, public voice, and repurchase intention.

In the fifth paper, Karthik Namasivayam, Priyanko Guchait, and Puiwa Lei examine the role that psychological empowerment (PE) and employee satisfaction (ES) play in the relationship between leader empowering behaviors (LEB) and customer satisfaction (CS) and employees’ organizational commitment (OC). Data were collected from 40 units of a chain restaurant in the USA, including 365 frontline employees and 2,915 customers. The results of the study indicate that LEB influences PE, and PE in turn influences employee satisfaction, which consequently results in higher employees’ OC levels as well as customer satisfaction.

In the sixth article, Debbie Tromp and Robert Blomme discuss the impact of leadership styles on work-family conflict among highly educated employees in the hospitality industry. A survey was conducted among a sample of 126 highly educated hospitality employees working at different companies. Autocratic leadership style, working overtime and a lack of work-home arrangements contributed significantly to work-family conflict.

In the next article, Lijia Xie and Chih-Chien Chen attempt to examine customers’ perceived value of hotel loyalty programs. An extensive sample of 15,000 respondents was randomly selected from a pool of US domestic tourists who previously requested tourism information from the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (CVB) websites across the country. This study breaks down loyalty program practices into individual brand levels and compares the perceived program value of eleven major hotel loyalty programs. This study provides a better understanding of the perceived program value that may affect active loyalty and explains how the value varies by different hotel loyalty programs.

In the final article, Yim King Penny Wan examines female casino dealers’ perceptions towards gender disparity at work. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 40 female casino dealers recruited from the six major casinos in Macao. The results indicate that female casino dealers have more advantages at work than their male counterparts. The study findings challenge the traditional assumption that females face more disadvantages at work than males. The study advocates the need to explore whether gender disparity differs in different work settings in order to avoid the problems of generalization and simplification.

This issue includes two book reviews. Richard Robinson provides a review of The Tourist Gaze 3.0, by John Urry and Jonas Larsen (Sage, London). The second book review is provided by Christine Petr on Hôtellerie et Hébergement: Les enjeux humains de l’hospitalité (Hotels: The Human Dimension of Hospitality, which was co-authored by Brice Duthion and Frédéric Dimanche.

We hope that our readers find all the articles published in this issue timely, relevant and useful.

Fevzi Okumus
Editor-in-Chief

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