Editorial

Citation

Okumus, F. (2013), "Editorial", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 25 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijchm.2013.04125aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Volume 25, Issue 1

In 2013 we are proudly celebrating IJCHM’s 25-year anniversary. Since its first issue published in 1989, IJCHM has made a significant impact on the hospitality and tourism field. We sincerely thank Dr Richard Teare, the founding editor, our readers, authors, editorial board members and the ad hoc reviewers for their ongoing support and contribution to IJCHM as the journal continues to go from strength-to-strength.

As you all know IJCHM was accepted into the Social Science Citation Index in 2010 and we are delighted to inform our readers and authors about the release of IJCHM’s first Impact Factor. According to the 2011 Journal Citation Reports®, which was announced in June 2012, IJCHM’s first impact factor was 0.929. This is indeed a great result, which strengthens the IJCHM’s position among the top journals in the hospitality and tourism field. For the past five years IJCHM has being ranked 3rd in terms of downloaded articles among Emerald’s 300 journals. We are currently receiving about 250 paper submissions per year with an acceptance rate of approximately 15 percent.

In 2012 we announced a strategic partnership reached between IJCHM and the Department of Hospitality and Service Management (DHSM) at Sun Yat-Sen University’s School of Business (SYSBS). According to this strategic partnership agreement, IJCHM will have a second editorial office at SYSBS. Professor Fevzi Okumus, the Editor-in-Chief of IJCHM, will visit SYSBS as a visiting professor once a year to deliver workshops and work on joint projects and publications with faculty members and PhD students from SYSBS. Professor Jingyan Liu from DHSM has become the associate editor of IJCHM and Professor Lishan Xie has joined the IJCHM Editorial Advisory Board. Dr Xinyuan (Roy) Zhao has been appointed as the editorial assistant to support and work with the Editor-in-Chief of IJCHM and the Associate Editor Professor Liu. The editorial team from DHSM will work on a special issue related to ethical and sustainability issues in the tourism and hospitality industry in China and help Dr Okumus with reviewing and making decisions on submissions from the Asia and Pacific region. The editorial office of IJCHM at SYSBS will be operated by Prof. Okumus, the Editor-in-Chief of IJCHM, Prof. Jingyan Liu, the Associate editor, Prof. Lishan Xie, the Editorial Advisory Board member, and Dr Xinyuan (Roy) Zhao, the Editorial Assistant. All IJCHM Editorial Advisory Board Members will be entitled to use this editorial office for academic exchanges such as joint research, seminars, workshops, and conferences. This is an innovative mode of academic partnership, which echoes the fast development of hospitality research and practice in the Asia and Pacific region. Given the exponential developments of the hospitality industry in China for the last two decades as well as a tremendous growth potential in the Asia and Pacific region, we believe that this strategic partnership will be greatly beneficial for both IJCHM and SYSBS. We sincerely thank Professor Jafar Jafari for coming up with this creative partnership idea and also for his assistance and guidance in reaching this agreement between IJCHM and SYSBS.

This first issue of IJCHM in 2013 includes eight full articles. In the first article, Chih-Chien Chen and Zvi Schwartz explored booking behavior in an online experiment. The research findings suggest that a sharp increase in the participants’ propensity to book occurs during the last week before the date of stay. In the second article, Sandy Chen, Stowe Shoemaker and Dina Marie Zemke examined the motivations, behaviors, and preferences of slot machine customers. The authors collected data through an online survey from slot machine players. Based on the research findings, the authors segmented the slot players into four clusters that explain motivations and game preferences. This is the first published study that segments slot machine players from a marketing perspective and identifies their preferences, behaviors, and demographic groupings. In the third article, Catherine Prentice investigated the relationship between casino service quality, player segments and customer loyalty in an Asian casino. The author collected data through focus group interviews with gamblers of different segments. The research findings indicate that players at different segments have distinct perceptions of service quality. Operationalizing service quality into five dimensions, this study has shown that various dimensions of service quality have differing effects on customer loyalty, and the level of loyalty varies across different segments.

In the fourth article, Alleah Crawford sought to answer whether a person as an employee, an individual or a leader be pre-disposed to deliver service. This study used an interpretive phenomenological approach and collected data through semi-structured interviews. The research findings explained how hospitality operators view service, including necessary external and internal attributes. This research is valuable to service practitioners as it identifies key attributes necessary of service providers that can aid in selection and training. In the next article, Osman Karatepe aimed to develop and test a research model that investigates work engagement as a mediator of the effects of perceptions of organizational politics on affective organizational commitment, extra-role performance, and turnover intentions. The author gathered data from a sample of 231 full-time frontline employee-supervisor dyads in Iran. Study results show that the fully mediated model provides a better fit to the data than does the partially mediated model. Results further indicated that work engagement acts as a full mediator of the impacts of perceptions of organizational politics on affective organizational commitment, extra-role performance, and turnover intentions.

Tae Won Moon, Won-Moo Hur and Jae-Kyoon Jun examined whether and how the perceived organizational support (POS) influences emotional labor and the relationship between emotional labor and flight attendants’ outcomes. Structural equation modeling analysis provided support for the hypotheses from a sample of 256 flight attendants in South Korea. Study results showed that POS has a positive effect on deep acting. Furthermore, the study found that surface acting has a positive influence on emotional exhaustion, whereas deep acting has a negative influence on emotional exhaustion. Susan Arendt, Paola Paez and Catherine Strohbehn sought to answer what would make managers more effective in their role of assuring safe food practices are followed in the workplace. The authors collected data through focus groups with current and future foodservice managers. The software program, Atlas.ti™ was used to complement researchers’ analyses of focus group transcripts and develop visual representations of qualitative data. Major thematic categories identified by the managers in this study included: role identification, food safety training, and manager effectiveness.

In the final article, Dr Alexandros Paraskevas proposed a baseline strategy to address possible terrorist attacks. Using the terrorist attack cycle and the security function models introduced in this paper, 19 hotel security experts were tasked to reach consensus on a baseline anti-terrorist strategy for a hotel. To reach this consensus, the study employed the Nominal Group Technique. The study presents a six-step baseline anti-terrorism strategy and a series of measures and actions under each step. The paper presents, for the first time, two models that industry practitioners will find useful when designing security policies: the terrorist attack cycle and the security function model

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

Fevzi OkumusEditor