Loyalty as a Guide to Organizational Retention: Applying Moral Foundation Theory to Hospitality

Moral Foundations Theory is used to help explain human behavior and beliefs across cultural contexts. In this study, one specific foundation, loyalty, was used to predict intentions to stay in an organization and job embeddedness. Regulatory focus was proposed as a moderator to the association with prevention focus being found to be particularly salient. A total of 744 hospitality workers were recruited and acted as participants for this study. A two-wave time-lagged design was applied for the data collection. The results showed that loyalty as a moral foundation predicted organizational retention, and that the association was mediated by job embeddedness. Furthermore, the results suggested that prevention focus moderates the relations between hospitality employees’ loyalty and job embeddedness, and between loyalty and intention to stay. The positive associations become stronger for the prevention-focused employees.