Presenteeism of hotel employees: interaction effects of empowerment and hardiness

This study aims to investigate the two-way interaction effects of empowerment and hardiness on the presenteeism of hotel employees.

Data were collected from 358 hotel employees in Sabah, East Malaysia, via a questionnaire survey and analyzed using multiplicative regression analysis.

The results confirm the presence of a two-way interaction effect between empowerment and hardiness on the presenteeism of hotel employees at a significance level of 0.01. Further analysis indicates that the higher the level of hardiness, the greater is its negative effect on the relationship between empowerment and the presenteeism of hotel employees.

The survey was cross-sectional and causal relationships among the variables cannot be inferred. The results were gathered from selected hotels and should not be generalized to all hotel employees in Sabah, East Malaysia.

The findings challenge the assumption of a positive association between empowerment and presenteeism and demonstrate that different levels of hardiness can influence this relationship. When empowering employees, management staff should also consider the provision of resilience-related training programs for less hardy employees. This would enable such employees to handle their presenteeism behavior arising from the increased level of empowerment.

This study provides the first empirical evidence of a two-way interaction effect of predictors on the presenteeism of hotel employees and could serve to influence mainstream journals in the presenteeism literature. Researchers could apply the analytical approach to examine future studies relating to higher-order effects of predictors on the presenteeism of hotel employees.