Employee Retention as a Social Sustainability Challenge in the Hotel Sector: The Roles of Fairness, Grit, and Service-Oriented Citizenship

2.1 Grand theory

The grand theoretical anchor for this study is the Resource-Based View (RBV), which explains heterogeneity in firm performance through the heterogeneity and relative immobility of firm resources [20, 21]. The RBV assumes that firms within an industry differ in their bundles of resources and capabilities and that these resources do not move freely across firms. Therefore, competitive advantage rests on deploying resources that are valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable, yielding sustained competitive advantage when rivals cannot replicate the underlying resource configuration or decipher the causal mechanisms linking resources to superior returns [20, 21]. Early RBV work conceptualized resources broadly to include tangible and intangible assets such as brand names, proprietary technologies, contracts, and efficient routines, as well as the knowledge, skills, and abilities of employees [22]. Subsequent elaborations emphasize that rivalry is best understood as competition over resource endowments and capability development rather than over static market positions or collusive behaviors and that firms must manage causal ambiguity and information constraints when assembling resource portfolios [23, 24].

In hospitality, the RBV offers a precise lens: human resources are both the most consequential and the hardest to imitate. Hotels operate through continuous, high-contact service encounters, where employee judgment, emotional labor, and tacit coordination directly determine quality. Heterogeneity is pronounced because labor forces draw from diverse cultural and experiential backgrounds, whereas immobility emerges when firms retain key employees long enough to embed firm-specific knowledge and team routines. Under these conditions, HR systems that attract, develop, and retain employees with distinctive psychological strengths become core strategic assets, rather than support functions. The RBV thus predicts that the capacity to cultivate and retain human capital that is valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable will separate hotels that sustain advantage from those that compete on price alone [25]. In short, employee attributes and organizational practices that stabilize them are not peripheral inputs, but the principal levers through which hospitality firms translate resources into durable performance.

2.2 Middle-range theory

Bridging RBV with testable mechanisms requires mid-range theories that specify how organizations mobilize human resources and how individuals convert attitudes into behavior. Human Resource Management (HRM) provides the first bridge. As a managerial philosophy, HRM aligns people’s policies with business strategy, builds high-performance cultures, ensures access to skilled and engaged talent, and fosters trust-based employment relations under an ethical frame [26]. Canonical HRM models underscore strategic fit, long-term orientation, stakeholder salience, and the complementarity between “hard” calculative controls and “soft” practices that elevate communication, motivation, and leadership [26]. Contemporary agendas extend to human capital and talent management, competency-based HR, reward systems, and employee engagement as drivers of strategic outcomes [26]. A comprehensive systematic review maps HRM scholarship into five clusters, notably “experiencing HRM” which encompasses retention, employee perceptions, psychological contracts, and engagement, the exact zone where hospitality’s people challenges concentrate [27]. This mid-range view reframes retention not as an administrative by-product, but as a strategic capability through which firms preserve and compound returns to their human capital.

A second mid-range pillar is the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), which explains how attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control shape intentions and, in turn, behavior [28-30]. TPB accommodates the reality that employees may intend to enact pro-organizational behavior, yet face constraints in knowledge, time, or coordination that blunt enactment [31]. Robust evidence links intentions to behavior while identifying moderators that strengthen intention–action conversion, including temporal stability, need satisfaction, implementation intentions, personality, and age [32, 33]. In hotel settings, the TPB clarifies how workplace norms and perceived control activate or suppress pro-service intentions. HR policies, supervisory climates, and peer expectations instantiate subjective norms; access to training, information, and tools constitutes perceived control. Together, they explain the variance in whether employees actually display discretionary, customer-facing behaviors that drive service quality.

Organizational Behavior (OB) and industrial-organizational psychology add a complementary lens by connecting enduring personality differences with work outcomes in teams and service systems [34]. The Big Five model captures relatively stable traits linked to performance, OCB, creativity, counterproductive work behaviors, and burnout across occupations, with clear implications for high-strain, high-contact hospitality roles, where emotional stability, conscientiousness, and agreeableness are repeatedly taxed [35]. OB research thereby rationalizes selection, socialization, and climate-building as levers that translate individual dispositions into collective service capability, tightening the conceptual link between the RBV’s human capital thesis and the observable micro-behaviors that constitute service excellence [36].

Finally, retention literature frames the dependent construct of interest. Turnover is persistently costly and salient, with direct replacement costs and indirect customer impacts that can erode performance [37]. Retention can be viewed from the employee’s perspective as a movement from consideration to commitment, which reduces exit intentions, and from the firm’s side as a deliberate system of practices that encourages employees to say positive things, stay with the organization, and strive beyond role expectations [38]. Mapping employees into enthusiastic or reluctant stayers and leavers further nuances the retention challenge and points to targeted interventions [37]. As a mid-range construct, retention becomes the behavioral end-state through which hotels conserve and scale their VRIN human resources.

2.3 Applied theory

At the applied level, this study focuses on three psychologically grounded antecedents—grit, fairness, and SOCB—and their relationships with retention in hospitality. Grit captures the perseverance of effort and consistency of interest directed toward long-term goals [18, 39]. Evidence links grit to sustained goal pursuit and retention beyond intelligence and the Big Five, including in demanding contexts such as the military and sales [18, 19]. Emerging work also associates grit with OCB and job attitudes, positioning it as a personal resource that sustains high performance under the pressure and monotony typical of hotel operations [17]. In the hospitality milieu, where 24/7 operations, emotional labor, and peak-period volatility are the norm, grit functions as a micro-foundation of resilience that the RBV deems strategically consequential.

Fairness, often discussed interchangeably with justice, encapsulates employees’ evaluations of distributive outcomes, procedural systems, and interactional treatment [40, 41]. Distributive fairness concerns the proportionality of rewards to contributions; procedural fairness concerns transparency and consistency in decision processes and timing; and interactional fairness concerns dignity, respect, and adequacy of explanations in interpersonal exchanges. Empirical research across services, retail banking, travel, restaurants, and repairs links fairness to OCB, organizational identification, and loyalty, whereas hotel-specific work remains sparse relative to its practical salience [42]. In frontline service systems, fairness signals that the organization values employees, thereby strengthening engagement and discouraging withdrawal cognitions that feed turnover.

OCB represents discretionary extra-role behaviors that support organizational functioning without being formally prescribed [43]. In hospitality, generic OCB is necessary but insufficient. SOCB specifies the customer-facing contours of extra-role behavior in three dimensions: loyalty, service delivery, and participation [16]. Loyalty concerns proactively promoting the organization’s services and images to customers. Service delivery focuses on acting as a communication bridge between external and internal environments, handling requests, and adapting to offerings. Participation emphasizes voluntarily proposing improvements to align services with evolving customer needs. Prior studies associate SOCB with service quality, competitive advantage, and financial performance, and suggest that HR systems, training, and leader–member exchange can induce these behaviors, although hospitality-specific evidence remains limited [12].

Positioning SOCB as a mediator aligns with both the TPB and RBV. At the micro level, grit and fairness shape attitudes, norms, and perceived control that foster intentions to go beyond role, which then materializes as SOCB. At the strategic level, these discretionary behaviors are proximate mechanisms through which VRIN human resources create value at the moment of truth with customers. Empirical hints support each link: grit relates to OCB and persistence; fairness predicts OCB with distributive fairness, often the strongest component; and OCB relates to turnover intentions and retention, although the findings are not uniform across settings [38, 43-45]. The mixed evidence underscores both the need and opportunity to test a fuller causal chain in a high-pressure, service-intensive context such as Indonesian hotels, where average turnover has been reported above benchmark levels and where sustained service quality is strategically decisive.

The applied model derived from this study is as follows. The RBV motivates a focus on human resources as strategic assets for hospitality. HRM and OB specify organizational levels and individual dispositions that nurture these assets and anchor behavioral expectations. The TPB clarifies how personal resources and fairness perceptions translate into intentions and realize extra-role service behaviors. SOCB then operates as a behavioral engine that links psychological antecedents to retention, an outcome that preserves and compounds human capital advantages. Using this logic, this study investigates whether grit and fairness directly enhance SOCB and whether SOCB reduces the propensity to leave, thereby improving retention. It also tested whether SOCB mediates the effects of grit and fairness on retention. This specification directly addresses documented gaps: prior studies have validated grit scales and tied grit to outcomes, linked justice to OCB, and connected OCB to turnover intentions, but have not jointly examined grit, fairness, SOCB, and retention within the hospitality context in Indonesia [17, 19, 44, 45].

2.4 Conceptual framework

Indonesia’s rapid expansion of hotels has intensified competition for high-quality talent and, in turn, raised employee turnover, making long-term retention a central managerial challenge. This study proposes that retention can be strengthened by identifying and developing employees with grit, ensuring perceptions of fairness in the employment relationship, and cultivating SOCB. Grit denotes perseverance toward long-term goals, reflected in the perseverance of effort and consistency of interest [46]. In practice, hotels should audit current staff and align future recruitment with these grit dimensions so that employees possess the stamina to perform under the 24/7 operational cadence of hospitality. Retention is also shaped by whether employees perceive the organization as fair. Fairness is experienced through distributive, procedural, and interactional dimensions; optimizing these signals is expected to foster both service OCB and willingness to remain with the firm. Engagement, which is observable by saying positive things about the organization, choosing to stay, and striving beyond role requirements, offers an actionable lens for monitoring the retention propensity [47].

Service OCB captures the extra-role and customer-facing behaviors that sustain service quality. Its core facets, that is, loyalty, service delivery, and participation, provide a concrete template for shaping frontline conduct and for designing training, evaluation, and recognition systems that encourage employees to promote the hotel, bridge customers’ need for internal processes, and proactively suggest service improvements [16]. Conceptually, hotels should also segment their workforce into enthusiastic stayers, enthusiastic leavers, reluctant stayers, and reluctant leavers to target retention efforts toward employees most likely to remain and intervene early with those at risk of exit.

Synthesizing these elements, the model in Figure 1 posits that grit and fairness each enhance service OCB, grit, fairness, and service OCB directly influence retention, and service OCB functions as the behavioral conduit through which grit and fairness translate into lower turnover intentions. Prior findings linking OCB to retention provide an empirical rationale for this pathway in service settings [38]. The framework is tested via a survey design with hypothesis testing to validate these relationships in Indonesia’s hospitality context.

The hypotheses articulate how the constructs derived from the literature are expected to relate within the hospitality context. Grit is conceptualized as a forward-looking source of motivation that imbues long-term goals with meaning, and reflects steadfast pursuit when those goals align with inner values [48]. Unlike conscientiousness, a relatively stable Big Five trait [49], grit is treated as a malleable motivational resource that is amenable to intervention and behavioral choices. Given its two facets, perseverance of effort and consistency of interest [46], employees with higher grit should be more inclined to enact extra-role and customer-facing behaviors. Accordingly, we hypothesized that grit would positively influence SOCB (H1). Because gritty individuals sustain effort, experience more positive work affect, and exhibit stronger self-control across domains [19, 50], we further posit a positive effect of grit on employee retention (H2).

Figure 1. Research design

Fairness is expected to foster prosocial service behavior and attachment. Prior studies link justice perceptions to ethical conduct, affective and cognitive mechanisms, leader–member dynamics, firm sustainability, and OCB, with salient predictors of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice [44, 51]. Therefore, we hypothesize that fairness positively influences SOCB (H3) and retention (H4), consistent with the evidence that justice strengthens loyalty and satisfaction [40]. As low OCB is associated with higher quit tendencies [38], we expect SOCB to positively influence retention (H5). Finally, integrating these pathways, we propose that SOCB mediates the effects of grit on retention (H6) and fairness on retention (H7), in line with research linking grit to OCB and retention [19, 45, 46], and justice to OCB and withdrawal cognitions [44].

4.6 Discussion

The first set of findings concerns the role of grit in shaping SOCB. Using PLS-SEM, we found that grit significantly predicts SOCB in the hotel context, consistent with the notion that perseverance of effort and consistency of interest equip employees to sustain effortful, guest-facing behaviors. Operationally, gritty employees are those who are not discouraged by setbacks, set clear work targets, work hard, stay focused, complete what they start, persist under pressure, and display diligence during routine tasks. These attributes align closely with the elements of SOCB observed in hotels: consistently promoting products, services, and brand image; acting as communication bridges between the firm and guests; proactively improving service; and taking and participating in service decisions. Such dispositions are especially consequential in a business that operates continuously throughout the year and where high service standards are inseparable from the product itself. The positive grit–SOCB link echoes prior work that frames grit as a future-oriented motivation that gives meaning to sustained effort, a steadfast pursuit of goals aligned with one’s values [48], and a target for behavioral development rather than a fixed personality trait. Anchoring grit in Duckworth’s dimensions of perseverance and consistency [46], our evidence suggests that these qualities translate into extra-role service-enhancing actions that define SOCB in hospitality. This result is also compatible with research showing that grit reduces emotional exhaustion and bolsters willingness to go beyond formal role requirements [55] and with the broader characterization of gritty individuals as those who persist through challenges [56].

The second finding was counterintuitive. Grit does not exhibit a significant direct association with retention. Theory suggests that perseverance and long-term consistency should help employees withstand pressure, stay engaged, and remain with their employers. Prior studies linked grit to retention across multiple settings, positive affect at work, and stronger self-control [19, 50]. However, our data were collected in a sector deeply affected by the pandemic, and interviews with ten hotel leaders indicated that job insecurity and exogenous shocks overrode personal dispositions in shaping staying decisions. This aligns with evidence that job insecurity lowers retention intentions, even among otherwise resilient employees [57]. In other words, grit may allow employees to persist in their roles, yet macro shocks and structural constraints can have a direct effect on staying behavior in hospitality.

Fairness has emerged as a robust driver of SOCB. Employees’ perceptions that they are treated with courtesy and respect, are listened to, and are given time to voice concerns, alongside consistent, appropriate, and fitting procedures and reward allocations proportional to contribution, all foster the willingness to go beyond the call of duty in service. Interactional, procedural, and distributive fairness appears to reinforce the social and cognitive mechanisms that underpin discretionary and pro-service actions. This pattern is consistent with prior work linking justice perceptions to ethical conduct, justice climates, leader–member relations, and OCB [51]. It also matches the evidence that the three fairness forms are central predictors of OCB in organizational settings [44]. In hotels where codified procedures and interpersonal interactions with both managers and guests are frequent and visible, fairness seems to be a particularly salient antecedent of service-enhancing citizenship.

Fairness also has a direct positive effect on retention. In a sector characterized by long hours, atypical shifts, limited public holidays, and intense guest demands, fairness acts as a stabilizing force. Interactional, procedural, and distributive justice not only reduces the impulse to search for alternatives but also strengthens felt loyalty to the organization. Prior studies support this logic: interactional, procedural, and distributive fairness increase organizational loyalty, a core component of retention, and guest interactions perceived as fair by frontline employees elevate employee satisfaction [40]. The present results extend the evidence to Jakarta’s hotel workforce by underscoring fairness as an actionable lever for curbing turnover.

SOCB itself was positively associated with retention. Employees who willingly promote the hotel’s offerings and image, mediate communication with guests, propose improvements, and participate in decisions are more likely to speak positively about the organization, feel part of it, contribute beyond expectations, and intend to stay. This is compatible with prior research mapping different staying and leaving profiles, and showing that lower OCB is associated with higher quit intentions [37, 38]. In hospitality, where customer contact is continuous and reputational stakes are high, SOCB appears to anchor a virtuous cycle in which extra-role service behavior fosters attachment and strengthens staying decisions.

Mediation analyses clarified these relationships. Grit affects retention indirectly through SOCB. The absence of a direct grit–retention path coupled with a strong grit–SOCB link and a positive SOCB retention path indicates that grit operates by channeling perseverance and consistency into visible service citizenship, which then fortifies employees’ inclination to remain. This pattern reconciles the non-significant direct effect with the theory and prior findings that connect grit to job-relevant outcomes and OCB [19, 45, 46]. In practical terms, cultivating grit may not immediately reduce turnover unless organizations scaffold and recognize the service behaviors through which grit manifests.

Fairness exhibits both direct and indirect links to retention, the latter through SOCB. Procedural consistency is especially salient in hotels where standard operating procedures govern most tasks. When similar issues are handled inconsistently across employees, perceptions of unfairness quickly degrade the motivation to invest in discretionary effort and stay. Conversely, fair procedures and respectful interactions encourage SOCB, supporting retention. This dovetails with the literature indicating that fair treatment elicits OCB, while perceived injustice leads employees to withdraw citizenship and narrow efforts to minimize contractual obligations [44]. It also aligns with the evidence that justice perceptions shape performance, engagement, and counterproductive behaviors [58].

Click or tap here to enter the text. Dispositional perseverance and long-term consistency are valuable, but their impact on staying emerges through behaviors that managers and guests can see and reward. Organizational fairness works on two fronts: it directly anchors staying by signaling respect, transparency, and proportionality, and it indirectly strengthens staying by eliciting the very service citizenship behaviors that bind employees to the organization. The implications for hotel leaders are clear. Recruiting and developing grit can raise SOCB, particularly when paired with systems that channel persistence into guest-facing improvement. Building and enforcing interactional, procedural, and distributive fairness should be treated as foundational retention strategies, not only to reduce inequities but also to catalyze a service citizenship culture that makes it attractive.

In short, the hospitality workforce remains, above all, both human and relational. Grit helps employees sustain the extra effort that guests make. Fairness signals that an organization notices in return. SOCB sits between the two, translating personal resolve and fair contexts into an enduring attachment to the hotel.