Best Papers in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly

Cornell Hospitality Quarterly (CQ) focuses on publishing scholarly research with hospitality management implications. The articles, written by academics as well as industry leaders develop new ideas and perspectives. Each year, the journal acknowledges the contribution of its many authors by naming one article the best paper of the year.

CQ’s 2012 Best Article Award winner is:

HyunJeong (Spring) Han, Cornell University
The Relationship among Corporate Culture, Strategic Orientation, and Financial Performance
Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, August 2012

And the runner up is:

Jie J. Zhang, University of Vermont School of Business Administration; Nitin R. Joglekar, Boston University School of Management; Rohit Verma, Cornell School of Hotel Administration
Exploring Resource Efficiency Benchmarks for Environmental Sustainability in Hotels
Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, August 2012

Our congratulations to these authors! Learn more about Cornell Hospitality Quarterly here, and click here to see past award winners.

Best Practices in Diversity Management

Each year, Diversity Inc. puts out a Top 50 list recognizing companies with outstanding diversity practices. A new study in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly samples these top performers to reveal what it is they are doing to successfully manage a diverse workforce–as well as the broad benefits these practices bring. Author Juan M. Madera of the University of Houston writes:

The analysis of the organizations’ specific practices revealed the following seven complementary and highly related categories of diversity management practice: corporate diversity council, diversity training programs, supplier diversity, employee networking and mentoring, cultural awareness, support for women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender network programs and same-sex benefits. The result of these policies is a highly diverse workforce and relatively diverse management in the sample firms.

Click here to read more in the article, “Best Practices in Diversity Management in Customer Service Organizations: An Investigation of Top Companies Cited by Diversity Inc.,” published in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly.

Study: Extra Rewards Make Customers Feel Guilty

Robert S. Donovan (cc)

It’s generally a great idea to “wow” your customers with unexpected benefits and perks–but a new study finds there’s also an unexpected downside to such preferential treatment.

Anna S. Mattila of The Pennsylvania State University, Lydia Hanks of The Florida State University, and Lu Zhang of The Pennsylvania State University published “Existential Guilt and Preferential Treatment: The Case of an Airline Upgrade,” forthcoming in the Journal of Travel Research (JTR) and now available in the journal’s OnlineFirst section. The abstract:

Using the context of an unexpected airline upgrade, we examined factors that influence an individual’s reaction when they are overrewarded compared to others: guilt-proneness and relationship to the other, underrewarded, individuals. Results demonstrated that for individuals high in guilt-proneness, satisfaction with the upgrade and behavioral intent may be qualified by a feeling of existential guilt when they receive benefits that others do not, particularly if they have a close relationship with those others. Our results extend the research in advantageous inequality by showing that people high in guilt-proneness tend to have a heightened sensitivity to such injustices. Our findings also have important implications for the hospitality, airline, and travel industries: for customers high in guilt-proneness, receiving an expected upgrade may, in fact, have unintended negative results. Managers can use this information to make employees aware of the potential detrimental effects of rewarding or upgrading only one member of a party.

Click here to continue reading, and follow this link to learn more about the Journal of Travel Research, which provides up-to-date, multidisciplinary research on behavioral trends and management theory for one of the most influential and dynamic industries. Don’t forget to sign up for e-alerts to stay informed!

What Really Drives the Research Design?

katerha (cc)

Kwok, Linchi (In press). “Exploratory-triangulation design in mixed methods studies:  A case of examining graduating seniors who meet hospitality recruiters’ selection criteria.” Tourism and Hospitality Research.

Qualitative vs. quantitative: which method is better? If they are equally valuable in social science, will the mixed methods approach (employing both qualitative and quantitative techniques) prove to be superior to a single method approach?

There is an on-going discussion surrounding the use of qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods in research studies. The biggest strength of the qualitative approach lies in its ability to yield descriptive, in-depth, and insightful data. As a result, frequency counts and numbers do not appear to be important in a qualitative study. Quantitative researchers, however, must rely on numbers to draw conclusions. Mixed methods researchers suggest that research approaches should be mixed in the ways that offer the best opportunity to answer complex research questions.

While I agree there are many advantages of utilizing mixed methods in tourism and hospitality research, I argue that scholars should forget their research paradigms and allow the research question(s) to drive their research design. When designing a mixed methods study, researchers should think “outside the box” and be creative in collaborating qualitative and quantitative methods in different stages of the research process.

In this article, I introduce the exploratory-triangulation mixed methods approach to hospitality and tourism research by illustrating a specific empirical example of using such a design to answer three different but complementary questions on the same topic. Using the exploratory-triangulation mixed methods approach, hospitality recruiters’ selection criteria for entry-level managerial positions in college recruiting settings were explored and triangulated with the attributes of hospitality graduating seniors who receive job offers. It appears the exploratory-triangulation mixed methods approach allows researchers to examine a complex issue with different perspectives and thus provides a broader and a more complete picture of a phenomenon. The conclusions drawn from this exploratory-triangulation mixed method investigation also yielded stronger conclusions as compared to the qualitative or the quantitative results when reported separately.

I hope this paper will encourage more researchers to consider adopting the mixed methods approach in future studies and open up a discussion of using a variety of mixed methods designs in research. Researchers need not follow a typical research design. Rather, they need to be creative and let the research question(s) drive the research design.

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Click here to read the paper in Tourism and Hospitality Research.

Linchi Kwok is an assistant professor of Hospitality Management in the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics at Syracuse University and a contributor to Management INK.

Want to Spread Your Message on Facebook?

Dr. Linchi Kwok, Syracuse University

Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Linchi Kwok, assistant professor of Hospitality Management in the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics at Syracuse University, whose research interests include social media and its business implications, organizational behavior, and service operations. Dr. Kwok and Dr. Bei Yu, also of Syracuse University, published “Spreading Social Media Messages on Facebook: An Analysis of Restaurant Business-to-Consumer Communications” on September 24 in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly.

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Want to Spread Your Social Media Messages on Facebook?
This Study May Help

Being a phenomenologist and a practitioner of social media, I see Facebook as one of the most important means for B2C (business-to-consumer) communications. When a Facebook user likes, posts comments, or shares content with their Facebook credentials, an update will appear on this person’s wall, helping companies rapidly spread information. Thus, companies must pay close attention to Facebook users’ reactions to the messages they send on Facebook. Facebook users’ endorsement of a message can be very important in indicating the effectiveness of a company’s social media strategy.

Dr. Yu and I adopted the text mining techniques to identify the type(s) of Facebook that are endorsed (and thus propagated) by Facebook users. We analyzed 982 Facebook messages initiated by 10 restaurant chains and two independent operators, of which were among the top restaurants in terms of sales volume and number of Facebook fans. We found the following results: the “more popular” messages, which receive more “Likes” and comments, contain keywords about the restaurant (e.g., menu descriptions); the “less popular” messages seem to involve with sales and marketing. Dividing the messages into four media types (i.e., status, link, video, and photo), photo and status receive more “Likes” and comments. To dig further, we coded the messages into two message types, namely sales/marketing and conversational messages, which do not directly sell or promote the restaurants. As compared to sales and marketing messages, conversational messages receive more “Likes” and comments even though they only account for one third of the messages in this study. There is also a cross-effect of media type and message type on the number of comments a message received.

Based on the research findings, we outlined several detailed practical tactics in this paper to help companies improve their use of Facebook. Theoretically, the findings of this study provide ground work for developing a defined typology of Facebook messages and an automatic text classifier with the machine learning techniques.

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Click here to read the article in the OnlineFirst section of Cornell Hospitality Quarterly. Follow this link to learn more about the journal and this one to receive e-alerts about newly published articles that provide timely and actionable prescription for hospitality management practice and research.

How Did 9/11, Financial Crisis Affect Hotel Performance?

Renáta Kosová (left) and Cathy A. Enz

Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Dr. Renáta Kosová and Dr. Cathy A. Enz, both of Cornell University, who published “The Terrorist Attacks of 9/11 and the Financial Crisis of 2008: The Impact of External Shocks on U.S. Hotel Performance” on September 20, 2012 in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly.

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The U.S. hotel industry faced two major external shocks in the decade of the ’00s—the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the financial crisis of late 2008 thought to have culminated on September 15th, the day after Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. While speculation and opinion has flourished on the impact of such shocks to the lodging industry, little attempt has been made to devise empirical models to isolate and explore the effects of these events on hotel performance. The conventional belief is that such shocks have a damaging and long-term impact on industry revenues. However, it is also possible that the impact of such shocks is overstated and hotels adjust relatively quickly, though such adjustment may vary across locations and segments. The impact of the collapse of the financial markets and the devastating events of September 11th on the lodging industry is the purpose of our study forthcoming in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly.

Using data from Smith Travel Research covering nearly 35,000 hotels, this study deploys a longitudinal modeling approach to assess the impact of the two shocks on hotel-performance metrics – average prices, RevPAR and occupancy. Our empirical approach not only controls for various hotel and market characteristics, such as hotel size and age, monthly seasonality, unemployment, population, and other market-specifics, but also unobserved hotel heterogeneity across hotels. Empirical models that include such controls are necessary to assure that the study captures the isolated impact of the external shocks and the duration of their impact.

The results from this study show that hotels were significantly affected by both events, but they started to recover relatively quickly, within four months of each shock. Because of the nature of the shock, the 9/11 terrorist attacks had an abrupt and dramatic impact in reducing hotels’ occupancy; average prices briefly followed occupancy downward. The effects of the financial crisis took longer to develop, but were less striking, and apparently well-handled by most hotel managers. Analyses across different segments revealed that hotels in the more complex luxury segment are the most susceptible to environmental shocks, but that the economy segment is the slowest in recovering from terrorism. Moreover, a sub-analysis focused on New York City’s hotels, which stand next to ground zero for both shocks, showed a pattern of occupancy, rates and RevPAR similar to the rest of the U.S. Overall, our study paints a picture of an industry that regained performance quickly and demonstrated its ability to successfully adapt and quickly recover from these extraordinary environmental shocks.

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Click here to read the article in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, and follow this link to receive email notifications about the latest research on hospitality management from CQ.

Strategies for Success in Service Innovation

Cathy A. Enz of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration published “Strategies for the Implementation of Service Innovations” on June 6, 2012 in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly. To see more OnlineFirst articles, click here.

The abstract:

Implementation strategies are the ways in which information about a new service innovation are shared with those employees who must execute on the innovation. This article examines the relationship between innovation success and the frequency of use of various strategies for the implementation of two specific nationwide service innovations in the North American hotels of a global lodging chain. Cost and service quality–based innovations were found to rely on different implementation strategies, suggesting that the connection between an implementation strategy and success depends on the type of innovation. In the hotel chain studied, the most successful strategy for implementing quality innovations was individual counseling, while rewards and focus groups were most strongly associated with success when implementing cost-based innovations. A mix of execution strategies including implementation by persuasion, leader intervention, participation, and even edict were linked to service innovation success. Participative employee-centered implementation strategies emerged as the most critical in the diffusion of service innovations.

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Call For Papers: Eco-Innovation in Hospitality and Tourism

epSos.de (CC BY 2.0)

Do you have a sound, useful, and practical message about innovative and sustainable practices of interest to managers in the hospitality industry? Submit your research to the upcoming special issue of Cornell Hospitality Quarterly: Sustainable and Eco-Innovative Practices in Hospitality and Tourism.

Special Issue:

Hospitality companies are cognizant of the importance of innovation and a proactive environmental approach to successful operation. Consequently, hospitality and tourism organizations are striving to be eco-friendly while maintaining their competitive edge financially. In support of this effort, we are seeking research that helps hospitality organizations create sustainable solutions that make best use of core resources and improve organizational efficiencies while reducing our collective carbon foot print. Research that helps hospitality and tourism organizations become operationally productive, socially responsible and proactively ‘eco-innovative’ citizens of the society is highly encouraged.

Submit Papers in these Areas:

Areas of inquiry may include but are not limited to:

• New models, frameworks, and explanations for the hospitality and tourism fields with a
• focus on sustainability
• Economics of sustainable decisions – qualitative and quantitative approaches
• Best eco-innovative practices in travel, tourism & hospitality organizations
• Defining sustainability – a critical review of current literature and suggestions for future
• ISO 400, Nordic Swan Green Palms – comparative analysis of Green tools and measures
• Scale development for measuring Green firms of tomorrow
• Case studies of champions of sustainability, social responsibility, eco-innovation and
• Green practices from hospitality and tourism
• ‘Going Green’ from an interdisciplinary perspective

Deadlines:

Abstracts Submissions – October 15th , 2012
Abstract Decisions – Nov. 15th, 2012
FULL Paper Submission – January 15th 2013
Full Paper Decisions – March 15th 2013
Submission of Revisions – April 15th 2013
Revision Decisions – May 15th, 2013

How To Submit:

Prospective authors are strongly encouraged to contact the special issue editors regarding potential topics of interest or any questions / suggestions regarding the special issue. Click here for contact information. All manuscripts should be submitted online via
mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cq only.

Please click here for more information and complete submission guidelines.

Gentlemen Prefer Red?

Flickr / ibm4381

Nicolas Guéguen and Céline Jacob, both of the Université de Bretagne-Sud, published “Clothing Color and Tipping: Gentlemen Patrons Give More Tips to Waitresses With Red Clothes” on April 18, 2012 in the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research. To view other OnlineFirst articles, please click here.

The abstract:

Recent research conducted with humans demonstrated that red, relative to other achromatic or chromatic colors, led men to view women presented on a photograph as more attractive. The effect of color on behavior was tested in a tipping context. Eleven waitresses in five restaurants were instructed to wear the same tee shirt with different colors (black, white, red, blue, green, or yellow). The effect of color on tipping according to patron’s gender was measured. It was found that waitresses wearing red received more tips but only with male patrons. Waitresses color had no effect on female patrons’ tipping behavior. The relation between red and sexual attractiveness are used to explain the results. Managerial interests related with clothing appearance were discussed.

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Location, Location, Location…and Competition

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Seul Ki Lee and SooCheong (Shawn) Jang, both of Purdue University, published “Premium or Discount in Hotel Room Rates? The Dual Effects of a Central Downtown Location” in the May 2012 issue of Cornell Hospitality Quarterly. To see the Table of Contents for this issue, please click here. Seul Ki Lee kindly provided the following insights about the article.

Who is the target audience for this article?
The study has significant relevance to hotel developers, real estate analysts, and hospitality researchers whose interest include the location of hotels and its implications.

What inspired you to be interested in this topic?
Location is arguably the most important product dimension of a hotel. Consequently, location can govern the substitutability among hotel rooms and the shape of competition among hotels in a market. We attempted to develop a way to explicitly model the effect of competition as a function of hotel location.

Were there findings that were surprising to you?
Although the direction of effect was as expected, the effect of competition on individual hotels’ pricing ability was somewhat larger than expected. This highlights the existing competition that a new developer should take into consideration when entering a saturated market.

How do you see this study influencing future research and/or practice?
We hope that future studies and practice will consider the incorporation of spatial effects when applicable. In some cases, allowing for spatial correlation may provide more precise and efficient models. In other cases, estimation of the spatial interaction itself may be meaningful, as in our study.

How does this study fit into your body of work/line of research?
This study is a part of our efforts to take into greater consideration the effect of location in hospitality research. Hospitality business is distinct in that consumption cannot be separated from production. Location naturally becomes a part of the product – modeled through travel cost, neighborhood quality, and presence of other resources. We plan to investigate further into the different types of spatial interactions pervasive in the hospitality industry and develop appropriate strategic implications.

How did your paper change during the review process?
The most pronounced changes were regarding clarity of expressions and development of the logical structure when presenting core problem of the study.

What, if anything, would you do differently if you could go back and do this study again?
If data were available, we would look at different cross-sections of the competition structure between economic booms/recessions, potential and oversupply/undersupply cycles. Such analysis would allow better understanding of the Chicago lodging market.

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