Impacts of Employee Empowerment and Organizational Commitment on Workforce Sustainability

: Building and maintaining a sustainable workforce in the hospitality sector, where demand for talent consistently exceeds supply across the globe, has only been exacerbated by COVID-19. The need to sustain this workforce behooves the industry to unpack core drivers of employee commitment in order to retain top talent. This paper explores how dimensions of employee empowerment increase organizational commitment and, in turn, reduce turnover intention—leading to a more sustained workforce. on the results of 346 surveys within the Canadian lodging industry, structural equation modeling was undertaken to examine the inﬂuence of empowerment on organizational commitment and organizational commitments inﬂuence on turnover intention. Findings suggest that the development of meaning through employee empowerment, particularly when the ideals and standards between workers and their organization are aligned, creates a strong emotional commitment which appears to strongly reduce an employee’s intention to leave. Feelings of emotional connection or duty towards an organization show clear positive relationships with reduced intentions to leave. For an industry struggling with higher-than-average turnover intention and labour costs, focusing on creating work with meaning, and instilling a sense of belonging in the workforce will enable organizations to reduce their employee’s turnover intentions.


Introduction
In the hospitality field, one of the key resources for the success of an operation is human talent. Unfortunately, a massive challenge for operators remains attracting and retaining a sustainable workforce. Prior to the dramatic challenges of COVID-19 on the hospitality industry, maintaining a sufficient talent pool situated retention and turnover issues among the top ongoing challenges in the industry, as expressed by hospitality operators [1,2], and without a doubt, the extraordinary task of attracting and retaining quality personnel into the hospitality field will remain as the industry moves beyond the current pandemic pressures. The necessary and responsible travel restrictions enacted through 2020 have massively suppressed hospitality employment; yet recent studies from Destination Analysts [3] support a powerful rebound effect in the hospitality field when safety permits, with data uncovering that 38% of American travellers surveyed had daydreamed of taking a trip within the prior seven days before being asked.
The study of talent management has grown dramatically over the last decade, often being undertaken at a strategic human resource level, focused on maximizing the output of high performing individuals positioned within key organizational positions [4,5]. While the concepts of talent management and the maximization of high-performance workers continue to develop within the hospitality field [6], there is also a growing narrative in hospitality management around the sustainability of sufficient labour. Recent research has explored various aspects of sustainable workforces, including empowerment and customer service in the restaurant industry [7], managing talent loss through better hiring that invested better relationships and establishing trust [8], as well as challenges in employee wellness and the related impacts on engagement and organizational commitment [9].
The tourism industry is a key employer in Canada with approximately 2.1 million people [10] employed across all sectors of this industry in 2019. The accommodations sector accounts for nearly 310,000 jobs in the 8289 lodging establishments currently operating across Canada that represent over 460,000 hotel rooms [11]. Yet, the Canadian tourism industry has also been facing a labour shortage, such that attracting and retaining sufficient workers, high quality or not, has been an escalating industry problem-one that will continue to exist following the current pandemic anomaly. According to the Hotel Association of Canada [12], two of every three lodging businesses identify labour issues as a serious impediment to their business operations, while Restaurants Canada notes that 56% of foodservice operators have identified labour issues as their most significant challenge [2]. The Canadian Tourism Research Institute [13] projects a labour supply shortage in the overall tourism industry, when it returns to traditional level, of just over 10% by 2035, while Tourism HR Canada [14] estimates the total number of unfilled tourism jobs in Canada will reach close to 240,000 by 2035. On top of this, aggregate voluntary turnover levels in the Canadian workforce have been growing year over year [15], 3.5 times higher than the aggregated average of all industries, with the Canadian lodging industry experiencing voluntary turnover of over 19% [16].
At the beginning of the 21st century, a 'war on talent' was declared in the hospitality field [17], and nearly twenty years later, talent management and sustainable workforces continues to exist at the top of the critical issues list for operators. As turnover remains one of the top industry challenges [1], it is a field worthy of updated exploration and research. Taking a multi-dimensional approach, this study explores how the various aspects of employee empowerment and organizational commitment influence an employee's intention to leave within the Canadian lodging industry.

Extant Literature
The literature on workforce management suggests that hospitality employees are often motivated by value opportunities for personal growth and development, as well as feeling that the work they do is strongly appreciated [18,19]. Empowering workers by sharing power and authority in the realm of decision making [20] has been shown to enhance a workers' sense of self-efficacy [21] while being strongly related to overall job satisfaction [22]. However, the field of research focusing on employee empowerment is somewhat fragmented, operationalized across four different and broad styles by researchers.
One viewpoint of empowerment as a construct has been centred on the outcomes and results of the activities of empowered employees, while a second perspective explored the operations and processes applied by workers while they are empowered to make decisions within particular operational areas. A third outlook examined the characteristics demonstrated by empowered workers in action, while the final style concentrated on an individual employee's perceived psychological state [23]. This study focuses on the final perspective by unpacking the psychological outlook of individuals and the influence their state of mind has on feelings of commitment to their organization and their subsequent turnover intention.
A widely accepted measure of psychological empowerment [22,24] is found in Spreitzer's [25] multi-dimensional approach that includes aspects of meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact. Empowerment through meaning develops from an alignment of ideals and standards between an employee and their work [26]. Competence stems from an employee believing they possess the skills and abilities to be successful [27]. Self-determination assesses the level workers believe they can influence tasks and activities needing completion [28]. Impact highlights the level an employee perceived their actions can influence outcomes [29]. Flexibility, trust, involvement, and the authority to satisfy customers all align with an empowered work environment [30].
Prior work has revealed positive associations between psychological empowerment and employee well-being, productivity, and performance [31]. Empowered workers have also been found to produce higher levels of service quality [32] as employees feel greater flexibility to meet unique requests of guests [33]. Employees who believe they have the ability and resources to satisfy guests also express greater job satisfaction [34,35]. A recent study, limited to upscale hotel workers in South Korea, revealed that empowerment flows through job satisfaction prior to impacting an employee's commitment levels [22]. Yet, a recent search of abstracts within the Hospitality & Tourism Complete database uncovered only 14 studies in the past 20 years that have mentioned empowerment and turnover issues within the same study, while few unpack these constructs within the Canadian/North American context.
When deconstructing an individual's perceived psychological state of empowerment, there is reason to examine how this may impact that employee's felt commitment towards their organization. Organizational commitment can be defined as "the relative strength of an individual's identification with and involvement in a particular organization" [36], considered by some to be an employee's global attitude towards their organization [37]. However, others approach commitment as a multi-dimensional construct [38], deconstructing it into three components: affective (want to stay), continuance (need to stay), and normative (ought to stay). According to Allen and Meyer [39], an individual may perceive each of these dimensions simultaneously but not necessarily in a convergent manner.
An employee's affective commitment represents their emotional attachment to their employer. Somers states that emotionally connected workers often accept the values of the organization and wish to remain [40]. Individuals with strong affective commitment frequently have workplace experiences that meet or exceed their personal expectations [41] and will often behave in ways that are in the best interests of their employer. However, employees who experience role conflict or ambiguity may blame their employer [42], thereby reducing their affective commitment. Prior research has shown that operators can take specific actions to positively influence the affective, or emotional, connections that employees feel towards their organization [43].
Continuance commitment develops as a blend of two factors: the size and volume of investment made in time and effort, as well as the volume of viable and equitable alternatives available [39]. Employees may feel they need to stay for them to 'win' and see their investments to pay off. However, normative commitment is grounded in an employee's perceived duty towards their organization [41]-they ought to stay and make positive contributions, thereby demonstrate a strong work ethic with their employer [44]. Increased feelings of empowerment, where employees experience control and freedom over their work, could well be positively associated with greater perceived duty to an organization and with high expressions of normative commitment.
The benefits stemming from having a committed workforce are many and varied. Increased employee commitment has been shown to positively influence customer satisfaction and loyalty [45]. Commitment has also been positively correlated with job satisfaction [46,47], although the directionality of that relationship remains in question [48,49]-are committed employees more satisfied, or does increased satisfaction impact commitment? Regardless, satisfaction and commitment appear to be positively linked. Additionally, increased organizational commitment has been linked to turnover intentions, demonstrating lower intentions to leave [50] and stronger intentions to stay [51]; however, much of the past research has been conducted outside of the hospitality industry.
High levels of voluntary turnover have been a longstanding challenge in the hospitality sector [1,2], influenced by inconsistent employment, shift work and irregular schedules based on customer demand [52], and compensation that is, on average, lower than other industries [53]. Negative impacts of high turnover are experienced in the form of direct costs incurred when attracting and training new staff [53], as well as the indirect costs experienced in revenue shrinkages stemming from reduced customer satisfaction [54]. While actual voluntary turnover can be measured after the fact based on exit employment information, predictions of voluntary turnover are often measured by capturing a current employee's "conscious and deliberate willingness" [55] to leave through their job or organization, classified as their intention to leave (ITL) [56]. Although organizational commitment has been studied previously in relation to intention to leave, past work has been limited in context, sample size, and dimensionality of the commitment construct [55,57]. To address these gaps, the current study uses Cho's 5-item unidimensional ITL scale [55] in conjunction with the full multi-dimensional analysis of organizational commitment developed by Meyer and Allen [38].

Hypotheses and Proposed Model
Employee empowerment has previously been a focal point of study in prior research, associated with satisfaction [58] or performance [59], or has been included as one of numerous other constructs which might influence perceptions of organizational commitment [60]. A search of the ABI/INFORM database does initially uncover a large selection of articles than included empowerment, commitment, and intentions to leave. However, only a minute selection of these studies related the psychological constructs of empowerment with commitment, and fewer still follow the relationship to explore turnover intent. As well, many studies fell outside of the hospitality sector; a more focused search of the Hospitality & Tourism Complete database only uncovered 19 studies within the recent past, with less than half of these projects exploring empowerment's impacts on commitment or considering the influences of these relationships on intentions to leave one's organization. Those few studies that have explored empowerment's direct relationship to commitment and intentions to leave have modelled the influence of empowerment on commitment and intention to leave separately [61] or were limited by small sample sizes [62].
Karatepe [63] utilized a unidimensional measure of empowerment as one part of a three-dimensional construct of high-performance work practices, while limiting the model exploration solely to impacts on affective organizational commitment and job performance, not turnover intentions. Ibrahim [64] recently completed a study focused within the Philippine lodging industry, performing a multiple regression analysis only between empowerment and commitment levels; however, the smaller sample size served to limit the significance of findings between every dimension of empowerment and commitment, and the work did not consider the impacts on intentions to leave. Meng and Han [22] richly explored empowerment's multidimensional impacts on commitment and turnover. However, their study was contextually grounded in South Korea, was limited in sample size, and the model only uncovered the impacts of empowerment through job satisfaction into commitment. In one of the few North American based studies, Gazzoli et al. [65] explored empowerment's impact on organizational commitment as perceived by restaurant workers; yet this relationship was modelled such that empowerment perceptions, measured multi-dimensionally, were filtered directly through an employee's customerservice orientation, from which organizational commitment, captured unidimensionally, was analysed. Chiang [66] explored the multidimensional aspects of empowerment on commitment, but also was limited by a small sample that was contextually rooted in Taiwan; their study also failed to support any relationships between empowered employees and organizational commitment.
To enrich research in this area, this study has been approached not by asking how empowerment influences job satisfaction, but by more directly connecting empowerment to practical operational outcomes of increased commitment and reduced turnover intentions. Empowerment, commitment, and intentions to leave can all be measured from a psychological perspective, exploring how an individual perceives their current work environment, their felt connections to that environment, and their plan to remain (Figure 1). This research proposes that each dimension of empowerment (meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact) will have a positive impact on commitment dimensions. Although all di-mensions should be positively related, it is expected that empowered workers will have stronger positive associations with emotional (affective) and duty (normative) commitment. Furthermore, employees who express stronger psychological commitment attributes to their organization should clearly demonstrate decreased desire to leave their current employment and entertain alternative opportunities. As such, the overall hypotheses are that employee empowerment is positively associated with organizational commitment, which in turn is negatively associated with an employee's intention to leave. Unpacking this proposal along dimensional lines leads to the following: Hypothesis 1. Each dimension of employee empowerment (meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact) will be positively associated with affective commitment.

Hypothesis 2.
Each dimension of employee empowerment (meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact) will be positively associated with continuance commitment.

Hypothesis 3.
Each dimension of employee empowerment (meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact) will be positively associated with normative commitment.

Hypothesis 4.
Each dimension of organizational commitment (affective, continuance, and normative) will be negatively associated with an employee's intentions to leave.

Sample
Data for this study was gathered from two separate sources within the Canadian lodging sector, with data from both sources collected using the same Qualtrics online survey platform. Initially, direct participation came from 12 branding hotel properties located across the provinces of Ontario and Nova Scotia. A census approach was taken with the human resource department distributing the survey to all employees through their internal email system. The interaction from these properties elicited 136 fully completed and usable responses. The dataset was then augmented with an additional 210 surveys gathered using Qualtrics panel data services, screening respondents through qualifying questions to only include current employees within the Canadian lodging industry. Independent t-tests were conducted to compare the data collected from both sources against all measured constructs, revealing no significant differences in mean scores between the two collection methods. After combining data from all hotel properties with panel data, the dataset had a total of 346 completed surveys.

Measures
Demographic information collected included gender, age, education level, annual income, current job level, as well as level of service within their current organization. Employee empowerment was measured from a psychological perspective using the 12-item, multidimensional scale developed by Spreitzer [67] which explores employee perceptions of meaning, competence, self-determination, and the impact they have in their work. The instrument has demonstrated both a strong overall reliability (α = 0.79) and dimensional reliability (α = 0.85, 0.84, 0.80, and 0.85 for meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact, respectively) [67,68]. Organizational commitment was also measured from a psychological perspective through the application of Allen and Meyer's [39] 18-item, multidimensional scale. This scale was designed to capture perceptions of commitment in terms of affect (emotion), continuance (necessity), and normative (duty) with respective reliability scores of α = 0.87, 0.75, and 0.77 [41]. Turnover intentions were measured using a 5-item, one-dimension scale focused on intentions to leave, with extremely strong historical reliability (α = 0.95) [69]. All dimensions of employee empowerment, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions were measured consistently using a 7-point Likert scale.

Method of Analysis
Construct relationships were examined using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to investigate the influences of employee empowerment on organizational commitment and organizational commitment on turnover intentions. SEM was used as it allows for examination of the relationships that can be defined between constructs, as well it has been used previously to examine relationships between employee empowerment and organizational commitment [66,70]. All data was loaded into SPSS 22.0 to reveal the demographics representation of the sample through frequency extrapolation. Subsequently, the data was loaded into AMOS 21.0 to complete both CFA and SEM analysis. The CFA was used to demonstrate the validity of individual measurement items, while SEM was applied to test model fit. As all latent constructs and measurement items had been derived from previous studies and documented as both valid and reliable, CFA was employed over exploratory factor analysis (EFA).

Demographics
The sample population skewed slightly higher in terms of female respondents (61.3%); however, this was a fair reflection of average industry breakdown by gender, with female employees representing 60.3% of the accommodations workforce [71]. Results demonstrate a fairly representative span of age groups and reported education levels. More than half of the respondents earned less than USD 40,000 per annum (59.8%), reinforcing the realities of lower overall wages earned in the hospitality industry, particularly by front line employees. The sample was relatively evenly distributed among respondents working in various levels, line or management, of their organization. A detailed breakdown of respondent information is provided in Table 1.

Scale Reliability and Validity
Internal consistency of dimensions within each construct was confirmed using composite reliability (CR) testing, and discriminant validity was assessed by looking at the average variance extracted (AVE) among dimensions ( Table 2). All multi-variable constructs had a CR score above the recommended level of 0.70 along with AVE levels higher that the 0.50 recommended minimum [72]. All individual variables for employee empowerment loaded to their respective historical constructs. Some individual variables assessing organizational commitment were removed due to poor loading, leaving three variables to represent affective commitment and five to measure normative commitment; variables focusing on continuance commitment failed to load together above the 0.50 level, so the strongest single variable has been used as a single item measure.

Structural Equation Modelling
Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to investigate the influences of employee empowerment on organizational commitment, and organizational commitment on turnover intentions. The overall model showed a root mean square of approximation (RSMEA) of 0.071, demonstrating a good fit by falling below the 0.80 threshold [73]. The comparative fit index (CFI) of 0.920 and the incremental fit index (IFI) of 0.921 both exceeded acceptable standards for a good model fit [71]. The chi-square/degree of freedom ratio of 2.7671 (769.262, df-278), fell within the range of 1 to 3 recommended by Bentler [74]. Relationship values calculated from the SEM testing are presented in Figure 2. All three dimensions of organizational commitment were significantly positively influenced by the meaning dimension of employee empowerment, while the normative dimension of commitment was significantly negatively impacted by the competence dimension of empowerment. Affective commitment and normative commitment were both found to significantly negatively influence an employees' intention to leave their organization. Continuance commitment did not hold a significant relationship with intention to leave.

Figure 2.
Significant SEM results 1. A notation was made to identify the asterisk values as levels of significance in the SEM relationship.

Findings and Implications
Employee perceptions of empowerment in the dimension of meaning, the alignment of ideals and standards between employees and their organization, represents strong emotional connections and resonance. This dimension was the sole area related to increased levels of employee commitment across all dimensions, including stronger emotional attachments to their employers, increased investment into their employer relationship against viable alternatives, as well as increased perceived duties and responsibilities towards their organizations, or affective and normative commitments. This supports earlier work around the impacts of culture, honesty, ethics, and fit on an employee's intention to quit [75]. Investment of resources into emotional connections, personally and culturally, would seem to impact employees' feelings of commitment strongly and positively across all dimensions.
In the dimension of perceived competence, employees believe they possess skills and abilities to be successful. The data reveals that stronger levels of perceived empowerment in the competence dimension was related to decreases in the commitment felt around continuance, or obligation. This is reflective of social cognitive theory and Bandura's concept of self-efficacy [76], wherein an individual holds confidence and persistence in how well they can perform and master challenges. Employees possessing higher perceived levels of skills and knowledge may well hold their personal skills in high regard, feeling less obligation to any one employer; instead, they feel more confidence in their own abilities which could secure them work elsewhere if necessary. This indicates that while investment in employee learning and skill development could be beneficial for an organization's operational performance, the skills gained through training will not translate directly into increased commitment; in fact, when considered in isolation, it could have a negative impact on an employee's commitment to their organization.
Employee perceptions in empowerment within the dimensions of both impact and self-determination, the level and intensity that employees perceive they can influence operational outcomes, had no significance on feelings of commitment in any category. It might be inferred that these dimensions of perceived empowerment, if high, are viewed as transferable to a preferred employer, while if low, fail to be salient in the evaluation of commitment perceptions.
The commitment that an employee holds towards their organization can be colloquially described in three ways: want to (affective), need to (continuance), and ought to (normative) stay with their current employer. Data in this study suggest that a need-based perception of commitment operates with little relation to an employee's intention to leave. Continuance commitment appears transactional in nature in which employees make a comparative analysis between current investments in their organization against external viable alternatives. Looking solely at this dimension in isolation, it may be that employees treat their current employer as a point of comparison, be this against their internal feelings of time and resources already invested or as a standard against which to contrast possible external job market opportunities. Regardless, and practically speaking, although an organization might be able to positively influence continuance commitment through the meaning-dimension of empowerment, there is no significant impact made by continuance commitment on turnover intent, and as such, does not warrant operational attention.
Instead, both affective (want to) and normative (ought to) dimensions of commitment appear to show strong, negative relationships with an employee's intention to leave. Increased emotional connections between employees and their organization, as well as feelings of loyalty, perhaps even obligation, show clear and positive impacts of employee retention. Both forms of commitment are most dramatically influenced when workers are empowered to perceive their tasks as valuable, important, meaningful, and there is a clear alignment in the ideals and practices between workers and their place of employment.

Limitations and Future Research
While this research has developed a greater understanding of the influence of employment on organizational commitment and turnover intention, expansion of this model could be looked at in future research. Given that past research has looked to understand how organizational commitment moderates the influence of employee empowerment on organizational commitment [19], future studies should look to build out this model to incorporate this influence. Furthermore, while this model did look at the influence of employee engagement on continuance commitment, and its subsequent influence on turnover intention, the variables focusing on continuance commitment failed to load together resulting in this study using only a single variable to represent continuance commitment. Replication of studies would assist in surfacing individual loading strengths; future studies should look to investigate increasing question variation within these dimensions to garner a stronger multi-variate construct of continuance commitment.

Conclusions
With COVID-19 having the greatest impact on the service sector globally, it behoves the industry to look for ways to not only attract but also retain top talent. To assist in this endeavour, this research sought to better understand which dimensions of employee empowerment contribute to an employee's perceived commitment to their organization and, in turn, how this might reduce their intention to leave. Empowerment in the areas of impact and self-determination showed no influence at all upon feelings of commitment. Employees may see these characteristics located within themselves, moving along with them should they decide to change employers. Without a salient connection between these dimensions and their workplace, there appears no influence exists with organizational attachments, be it desire, necessity, or obligation. Empowerment in the area of competence also appear to be located internally, and therefore transferable. The skills and abilities employees believe they have at work in fact serve to somewhat reduce the obligations felt in commitment. While training workers to increase efficiency, consistency, and quality are all excellent intention, training with the belief that employee obligation to reciprocate with additional loyalty will increase could be a misplaced and erroneous notion.
Only the empowerment dimension of meaning revealed significant, positive relationships with all areas of commitment, isolating the serious value that can be found when the ideals and standards of workers and their organizational are in alignment. Specifi-cally, strong meaning influences both an employee's commitment around desire as well as feelings of duty; both areas revolve around relational attributes ground in connections to the organization, with no involvement around necessity. Furthermore, higher levels of employee commitment, either affective or normative, positively reduce intentions that employees may have to leave.
Practically speaking, this is powerful information for hospitality managers seeking to increase attraction and retention of workers in a highly competitive labour market to maintain a sustainable workforce. Operators can better design hiring processes that surface the values and principles of potential hires during the screening phase, increasing the potential of a good match between a new employee and the business. However, with labour supplies having been, and liking to return to a deficit position post-COVID-19, employees remain in a position of power. They can choose from among multiple workplace cultures and find the best possible fit for themselves, or laterally pivot to a different hospitality operation should they discover poor person-organization fit around meaning. As such, it makes strong business sense for hospitality businesses to clearly identify and communicate their operational standards and ideals so that they may better attract like-minded prospects.
In this time of crisis brought on by COVID-19, businesses need to find ways to cut their hiring, onboarding, and training costs, which they can achieve, in part, by focusing on reducing their employee turnover. One way in which to reduce turnover is to look at stimulating and increasing the organizational commitment of your current employees and those who you hire into your organization. By creating work with meaning, instilling a sense of belonging in their workforce, and increasing the emotional connections found in the alignment of values, organizations will be able to reduce their employee's turnover intentions.