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This review aims to summarize previous research on work–family relationships in the tourism and hospitality contexts. It then integrates the various approaches into a holistic model and identifies important areas for future research.

Over 150 research papers from the past 20 years were retrieved from Elsevier Science Direct, SAGE, Emerald, Taylor & Francis and EBSCOHost. In total, 77 papers reporting empirical research were analyzed in terms of concepts, theories, antecedents, consequences and methods.

The major findings on work and family issues in the tourism and hospitality contexts were synthesized. Critical topics for future research were identified. A holistic model of the factors that affect work and family was developed to improve the consistency of future research.

An overview of work–family studies will provide a solid research background to tourism and hospitality faculty members and graduate students who are considering research in this area. This paper is a general review of previous research, and the review focus is relatively global.

This paper is the first comprehensive summary and narrative review of work and family studies in tourism and hospitality.

Customer misbehavior has a negative impact on frontline employees. However, the underlying mechanisms from customer misbehavior to employees’ negative outcomes need to be further unfolded and examined. This study aims to propose that employees’ affective rumination and problem-solving pondering could be the explanatory processes of customer misbehavior influencing employee attitudes in which coworker support could be a moderator.

A mixed-method approach was designed to test this study’s predictions. Study 1 conducted a scenario-based experiment among 215 full-time hospitality employees, and Study 2 used a two-wave, longitudinal survey of 305 participants.

The results demonstrate the impact of customer misbehavior on work–family conflict and withdrawal behaviors. The mediating role of affective rumination is supported and coworker support moderates the processes.

Customer misbehavior leads to negative outcomes among frontline employees both at work and family domains. Hotel managers should help frontline employees to cope with customer misbehavior by avoiding negative affective spillover and providing support properly.

The studies have unfolded the processes of affective rumination and problem-solving pondering through which customer misbehavior influences work–family conflict and withdrawal behaviors among frontline employees. The surprising findings that coworker support magnified the negative effects have also been discussed.

Frontline employees’ proactive behaviors (i.e. job crafting) are critical to satisfying customers’ idiosyncratic needs. If the supervisors practice job crafting, their subordinates are more likely to mimic such behaviors. However, there has been limited research on how leaders’ job crafting can influence subordinates’ job crafting. This study aims to examine the cross-level mechanisms (i.e. trickle-down effects) of supervisors’ job crafting on the subordinates’ attitudes and performance. Specifically, such trickle-down effects can be explained via two cross-level mechanisms of the supervisors’ job crafting on the subordinates’ work engagement and performance: social learning mechanism and job demands-resources mechanism.

A three-wave cross-lagged study was conducted in two-week intervals. The valid responses from 67 supervisors and their 201 subordinates were collected. The data set was analyzed using multilevel Structural Equation Modeling.

The results demonstrated that the social learning and job demands-resources mechanisms are not independent. The supervisor’s job crafting improves employment relationships, subsequently encourages subordinates’ job crafting and ultimately enhances work engagement and work performance.

The findings suggested that hospitality organizations should encourage job crafting among supervisors and managers. A proactive hotel manager can establish strong employment relationships, motivate subordinates to work proactively and obtain positive work outcomes.

The findings enrich the knowledge about the trickle-down effects of supervisors on subordinates in terms of job-crafting behaviors. In particular, this study found a new theoretical perspective that the job demands-resources and social learning mechanisms may not be independent, and the subordinates’ perception of the employment relationship plays a critical role.

This study aims to illustrate how organizational support can reduce work-family conflict (WFC) and improve job/life satisfaction by synthesizing the empirical findings among hospitality employees.

Previous empirical papers were searched through tourism and hospitality journals and 54 studies were ultimately selected. The correlation coefficients were coded and examined through meta-analysis, after which they were used to test the hypothesized model via meta-analytic structural equation modeling.

Findings demonstrated that organizational support plays a critical role in helping employees release WFC and improve life satisfaction but not job satisfaction. The number of children is a salient factor at the individual level on predicting WFC, whereas gender relates only to life satisfaction. The asymmetric permeable roles of WFC dimensions among work, family and life domains were also shown.

The findings can help hospitality managers be aware of the critical roles of organizational support in assisting employees to handle WFC and improve job and life satisfaction.

The relationships among organizational support, WFC and job/life satisfaction of frontline employees have been examined for the first time via meta-analytic SEM. In this manner, previous consistent and inconsistent findings can be synthesized for future theoretical development.

This paper aims to offer empirical insights on how investing in e-commerce capabilities affects the relationship between loyalty programs and hotel operating performance so as to aid in identifying proper resource allocation strategies.

This study extended the model in Hua et al. (2015) by testing the interaction of e-commerce and loyalty programs.

The findings illustrate that proper allocation of company financial resources to e-commerce initiatives can help improve the impact of loyalty programs on hotel operating performance.

The results of this study illustrate that hotel performance can be improved by the synergy between loyalty program and e-commerce initiatives. Thus, hotel managers and owners can use results from this study to improve the efficiency of their asset allocation strategies, with five practical implications offered.

Theoretically, this study adapted and extended an integrative model of hotel operating performance (Hua et al., 2015) by identifying critical factors that elucidate the variance in firm performance. In addition, the moderating role of e-commerce provides a new conceptualization of information technology. Practically, this study makes several important contributions as well.

This paper aims to examine the impacts of transformational leadership and employee proactive personality on service performance, the mediation role of organizational embeddedness and the synergies of transformational leadership and proactive personality within the proposed framework.

Data was collected following a time-lagged research approach. The study sample included 218 frontline employees and their supervisors from ten carefully selected five-star hotels in China. Structural equation modeling was employed for the data analysis.

Transformational leadership and proactive personality had positive effects on task performance and contextual performance via organizational embeddedness. The interactive influences of transformational leadership and proactive personality on task performance and contextual performance were found significant and negative.

Transformational leaders and proactive employees have been shown to exert a strong influence on excellent service performance, with organizational embeddedness playing a critical role.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate potential barriers to deployment of information technology (IT) projects and evaluate strategies to overcome them in hotel companies.

Empirical data were collected through a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews from IT managers, chief information officers, and hotel general managers.

The research findings demonstrate that barriers to IT implementation occur in three different stages. They are pre-implementation (cost and return on investment, resistance by owners/executives); during the implementation (integration, time delays, vendor communication problems, and resistance by employees); and post-implementation (inadequate training and resistance from customers).

The research findings suggest a contingency approach where organizations should employ various specific strategies depending on the situation to overcome these barriers. Multiple theoretical perspectives should be utilized to evaluate potential barriers to IT projects and utilize specific strategies to overcome them.

This is one of the first empirical studies which provide specific theoretical and practical implications on barriers when implementing IT projects in hotels.

This study aims to theoretically construct the role of hospitality job characteristics (HJCs), conceptually identify specific HJCs and empirically examine the relationships of these to work–family conflict and job stress. Hospitality employees work in a “smile factory” – often under stress.

Data were collected from 346 hotel employees in China and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) and a series of hierarchical regression analyses (HRA).

The SEM results confirmed the general role of HJCs as a job stressor, and the HRA findings differentiated the specific impacts of the characteristics on work–family conflict and job stress.

The survey was cross-sectional and correlational in nature. Furthermore, the results were also from selected hotels, and the respondents do not fully represent all hotel employees. Finally, the measures of hospitality job uniqueness were employees’ subjective agreement on the given statements.

The study offers a systematic framework of specific job characteristics in the hospitality context for the reconciliation of previously inconsistent research findings. The findings may also be useful to hospitality managers as they attempt to analyze and understand the specific job characteristics that are the most salient reasons for withdrawal attitudes and behaviors.

The present study identified the list of HJCs by summarizing previous studies and examining the roles of HJCs in work attitudes among hospitality employees. These efforts could be helpful both for scholars by constructing a consistent base for future research and for managers by precisely analyzing the specific job attributes.