The effect of workplace spirituality on hospitality employee engagement, intention to stay, and service delivery

A key challenge facing hospitality organizations is how to retain and engage frontline employees who play an important role in influencing customer satisfaction. Although engagement has recently received considerable attention from scholars, much still remains to be learned about its intrinsic motivation and work meaning antecedents. Workplace spirituality has been conceptualized as offering new insights into how individuals experience a deeper level of intrinsic work motivation and engagement. This study found that workplace spirituality has a direct effect on employee engagement and intention to stay in a study of 292 employees in a U.S. hospitality organization. Engagement was found to be related to employees' service delivery, but not to their intention to stay. In doing so, this study provides new insights into the intrinsic work motivation antecedents of engagement and is the first investigation to empirically assess the joint effects of workplace spirituality and engagement on employee service delivery and intention to stay. (C) 2018 The Authors.