Sun Yao, Rupam Konar and Chia Kei Wei

Abstract: The hospitality industry should adopt employee advocacy (EA) as it is the best method with which to foster and manage customer relationships. However, extant studies on EA are not only split across varying contexts, but very few have examined EA in the context of the hospitality industry. Furthermore, relationship management theory (RMT) does not fully explain EA in the context of the hospitality industry either. Therefore, this present study arranged extant studies, that have identified the drivers of EA, into an integrated framework. The findings indicate that a combination of organisational support (OS) and internal branding (IB) helps foster employee-organisation relationships (EORs), while the personal resources (PRs) of hospitality employees and their perceptions of situational problems (PSPs) further bolster EORs. More specifically, employees with high-quality EORs are more likely to use their PRs to act as brand advocates and be more committed to resolving problematic situations. Therefore, the proposed framework refines RMT to better explicate the dynamics surrounding EORs and EA.

Keywords: Employee advocacy, employee-organization relationship, integrative framework, organizational identification, trust