Locus of control as a moderator of the effects of COVID‐19 perceptions on job insecurity, psychosocial, organisational, and job outcomes for MENA region hospitality employees

• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Author: Ali B. Mahmoud,William D. Reisel,Leonora Fuxman,Dieu Hack‐Polay
• Date: 01 July 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12494

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Locus of control as a moderator of the effects of COVID-19

perceptions on job insecurity, psychosocial, organisational, and job

outcomes for MENA region hospitality employees

Ali B. Mahmoud

1,2

| William D. Reisel

1

| Leonora Fuxman

1

| Dieu Hack-Polay

3,4

1

St. John’s University, New York, New York,

USA

2

University of Wales Trinity Saint David,

London, UK

3

Crandall University, Moncton, Canada

4

University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

Correspondence

Ali B. Mahmoud, St. John’s University, New

York, NY, USA.

Email: elguitarrista@live.com;

mahmouda@stjohns.edu

We develop and test an integrated model to understand how individual differences

based on internal or external locus of control influence the effects of COVID-19

perceptions on job insecurity, anxiety, alienation, job satisfaction, customer orien-

tation, organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB), and turnover intention among

customer service employees within hospitality organisations in the Middle East

and North African (MENA) region. The investigation utilises variance-based

structural equation modelling to evaluate a sample of 847 subject responses. We

found that externally controlled employees are more likely to develop negative

emotions resulting from pandemic-triggered job insecurity as well as poorer cus-

tomer orientation and engagement in OCB due to worsened job satisfaction than

those internally controlled. Wholistically, COVID-19 perceptions tend to indi-

rectly hit externally controlled employees’anxiety, customer orientation, and

OCB more intensely than those with internal locus of control.

KEYWORDS

COVID-19, customer orientation, hospitality industry, job insecurity, job satisfaction, locusof control,

MENA region, organisational citizenship behaviour, psychosocial factors, turnover intention

INTRODUCTION

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has affected

nearly all aspects of daily life, introducing panic and fear

across the globe, subjecting healthcare systems to massive

caseloads and the simultaneous need to innovate treat-

ments to contain the deadly virus (Ibrahim et al., 2020).

Consequently, this pandemic represents a critical chal-

lenge for many business leaders, entrepreneurs, and

employees across nearly all industries and nations

(Donthu & Gustafsson, 2020). In addition, COVID-19

has imposed disruptions to the very nature of hospitality

services, turning many hotels and lodging services into

isolation centres for quarantined tourists who are vulner-

able to COVID-19 infection (Rutynskyi &

Kushniruk, 2020).

In response to the pandemic, hospitality industry

practices shifted quickly to provide physical distancing

(Khoa et al., 2020). Furthermore, a growing number of

businesses in this sector (e.g., hotels and airlines) have

deployed robots with disinfecting ultraviolet light

(Glusac, 2020), which has further accelerated machine

displacement over tasks customarily handled by humans

since the birth of the fourth industrial revolution

(Mahmoud, 2021). In this regard, the drive to replace

humans with robots is accelerating as firms struggle to

avoid workplace infections of COVID-19 and to remain

viable by cutting costs (Mahmoud, 2021), causing a per-

manent loss of at least 42% of the jobs (Semuels, 2020).

Therefore, as service robots acquire strategic importance

for service delivery systems within hospitality businesses

(Choi et al., 2019), this is built at the expense of human

capital (Mahmoud, 2021), producing adverse effects on

the psychological and well-being aspects (e.g., anxiety) as

well as job attitudes (e.g., job insecurity and job satisfac-

tion) and organisational outcomes (e.g., organisational

citizenship behaviours, customer orientation, and turn-

over intentions) (Mahmoud et al., 2021) in the hospitality

sector.

Our research focuses on how threats caused by

COVID-19 can lead to surges in job insecurity and poor

psychosocial responses among employees

(Hamouche, 2020). Thus, we anticipate that, as a func-

tion of COVID-19, there will be a deterioration of job

attitudes and organisational behaviours in the workplace

(Mahmoud et al., 2020). While this research does not

DOI: 10.1111/emre.12494

European Management Review. 2022;19:313–332. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/emre © 2021 European Academy of Management 313

address customer-related effects, we can surmise that hos-

pitality workers will serve their clients less well, leading

to a decrease in client satisfaction levels (Mahmoud

et al., 2021). It follows that service deficits can have the

ultimate effect of undermining the strategic flexibility of

business competitive advantage (Sverke et al., 2019). Our

contribution focuses on evaluating evidence about how

the broad effects of COVID-19 perceptions are related to

job insecurity, anxiety, alienation, job satisfaction, cus-

tomer orientation, organisational citizenship behaviours,

and turnover intentions amongst customer service

employees working in hospitality organisations. The

direct implications of our research apply to the MENA

region. However, we also expect the implications to gen-

eralise to other regional contexts given the common use

of contract and foreign labour in hospitality and other

industries. The pertinence of the findings for European

management is significant for the reason that many of

the large hotel chains in the MENA regions originate

from Europe, for example, Accor, Best Western Premier,

and the IHG group. Our findings furnish data that could

inform the preparation and management strategy of the

thousands of European executives sent every year to the

MENA as expatriate managers. This makes MENA hos-

pitality a sizeable employer of European labour force.

The research also has relevance for European manage-

ment, given the high mobility of both labour and hospi-

tality tourists between the two regions. In fact, many

customers of MENA hospitality firms are European

tourists, particularly from European countries pertaining

to the Mediterranean geographical sphere, for example,

Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Greece. At the same time,

much of the workforce in Southern European hospitality

industry have MENA national backgrounds

(Hopfinger & Scharfenort, 2020).

Additionally, we evaluate the role of employee self-

efficacy perceptions through locus of control

(Rotter, 1966) to establish whether subjects with internal

locus of control may be less likely to experience adverse

effects from COVID-19 perceptions in our hypothesised

model (Parent-Lamarche & Marchand, 2019). We

expect employees with external locus of control to expe-

rience more negative effects related to COVID-19 per-

ception. Thus, this study evaluates whether an

employee’s locus of control can influence the hypo-

thesised relationships and seeks to offer guidance for

management.

The MENA region has been under economic strain

and regional geopolitical conflicts and tensions for many

years. Compounding these economic challenges is the

ongoing COVID-19 crisis (OECD, 2020). No prior crisis

in modern history has caused as much destruction and

damage to the hospitality sector as COVID-19 has

(Sonmez et al., 2020).

This investigation’s geographic location is significant,

given that many MENA economies, besides the oil indus-

try, largely rely on the tourism industry, particularly

visitors from Europe (Luciani, 2017; Hopfinger &

Scharfenort, 2020). Moreover, the sector has been deeply

affected by the continuing COVID-19 crisis (Baum

et al., 2020). Nevertheless, little research has been under-

taken to understand these issues and how the response of

workers may be moderated by employee locus of control.

This research fills the knowledge gap in this area. Fur-

thermore, the intent is to offer guidance so local man-

agers and European expatriate executives can devise

policies to reduce the negative impact of COVID-19 on

hospitality workers.

The rest of this article is organised into three main

sections. The first section examines the literature that

addresses the precarity of jobs and psychosocial issues

affecting employees in the hospitality sector. This first

section also provides some background to the COVID-19

pandemic and forwards the hypotheses. The second

section presents the methods, including participant

recruitment, data collection, and analysis methods. The

third section discusses the study findings in relation to the

extant literature. The article finally draws conclusions

that summarise the key findings, offers practical implica-

tions, discusses the research limitations, and suggests

directions for future investigations.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Locus of control

The enormity of the threat posed by COVID-19 to

employees prompted us to contemplate if there might be

any mitigating factors based on individual differences,

and we sought to explore if certain individuals could

better navigate the shifting terrain and personal

response to the pandemic. To account for this and to

see if specific dispositional orientations might moderate

the model’s results, we focused on the idea of perceived

control over external events, given that COVID-19 rep-

resents a macro factor that will undoubtedly trigger

thinking about how to counteract its potential adverse

effects. Thus, we selected locus of control as a potential

explanatory disposition to understand how employees

might react when they view the world as either con-

trolled by external or internal factors. Rotter (1966) ter-

med this ‘locus of control’, which holds that employees

will differ on the extent to which they view rewards,

punishments, or other events in their lives as caused by

their own actions or by factors beyond their control.

Individuals with an orientation to internal locus of con-

trol are likely to view themselves as more able to man-

age external situations based on their ability,

experience, or self-efficacy. Conversely, we might pre-

dict that the model effects would be more pronounced if

the individual’s orientation was external locus of control

(Keim et al., 2014). A meta-analysis of locus of control

314 MAHMOUD ET AL.