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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 10, No. 7
Publication Date: July 25, 2023
DOI:10.14738/assrj.107.15024.
Hsieh, T. C. (2023). Using an Extension of The Theory of Planned Behavior to Explore University Students' Intention to Pursue Career
in The Hospitality Industry. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(7). 35-48.
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
Using an Extension of The Theory of Planned Behavior to Explore
University Students' Intention to Pursue Career in The
Hospitality Industry
Tsai-Chih Hsieh
Department of Hotel Management, Tainan University of Technology,
No. 529, Zhongzheng Rd., Yongkang District, Tainan City 71002, Taiwan
ABSTRACT
The hospitality industry has always been noticed as a labor demanding field, and
therefore manpower training is very critical to the hospitality industry. However,
even when hospitality-related universities and technology schools are growing,
there is still the dilemma of lack of manpower needs in the industry. Therefore, the
main purpose of this research is to use the extended version of the planning
behavior to add emotional intelligence and confront mechanisms to analyze the
intention of university or science and technology students to invest in the
hospitality industry in the future. This study conducted a survey of current and
completed internship students in a science and technology university. A total of 302
valid questionnaires were collected and analyzed by structural equation modeling.
The results found that the original planning behavior theory is not good at
predicting behavioral intentions. In other words, whether students are involved in
the hospitality industry is mostly based on emotional elements.
Keywords: confronting mechanism, hospitality industry, intelligence, planning behavior
theory
INTRODUCTION
The hospitality industry has always been considered as a labor-intensive industry (Chang, Liu,
Wang, & Yi, 2020). Even with the assistance of electronics and automation, it is still impossible
to avoid the need for a large number of human resources (Daziano, Sarrias, & Leard, 2017).
Therefore, manpower cultivation is of great importance to the hospitality industry. However,
even with the emergence of food-related universities and science and technology schools, there
is still a shortage of manpower requirements in the industry, mainly because even students of
foodrelated majors are not willing to engage in the industry (Walsh, Chang, & Tse, 2015), even
if they try to do so, they will find a high turnover rate (Frye, Kang, Huh, & Lee, 2020; Gibbs &
Slevitch, 2019), a graduate of the author to investigate experience shows that only about thirty
percent of students graduated from the second half in related industries, and that figure will
together with the time goes by, with only ten percent less than three years later, so even if the
food and beverage department and hospitality industry booming, still cannot solve effectively
the human dilemma stretched (Walsh et al., 2015).
The hospitality industry is characterized by long working hours and high pressure, which is one
of the main reasons leading to high dimission rate or low jobhunting intention (Kim & Agrusa,
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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol. 10, Issue 7, July-2023
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2011). When employees can effectively deal with pressure, their work performance and job
satisfaction will be improved (Kim & Agrusa, 2011; Wen, Huang, & Hou, 2019), which naturally
improves employees' willingness to stay in the hospitality industry (Walsh et al., 2015).
However, most studies only focus on the causal relationship between employees' confronting
mechanism and performance, and most think that confronting mechanism is an innate trait of
individuals, while few studies attempt to understand how to improve confronting mechanism
(Walsh et al., 2015; Wen et al., 2019), a few relevant articles have found that the confronting
mechanism to stress can be improved through training, especially the improvement of the so- called "emotional intelligence" (Mattingly & Kraiger, 2019), so as to train employees to deal
with stress more effectively.
So this study wanted to understand how, through the education of college or university of
science and technology, to improve the students' emotional intelligence and their tolerance to
stress, and hopes that this can strengthen their willingness to join in the hospitality industry is
more accurate, this research plans to adjust behavior theory to study, through the model
analysis of behavior intention ability (Goh & Lee, 2018), survey the students into the behavior
intention of hospitality industry, originally planned behavior theory by Ajzen (1991) a survey
of behavioral intention model,This model can be used to understand what factors affect
people's decisionmaking process, and this framework has also been widely applied in other
industrial studies, including tourism, dining and travel-related industries (e.g., Chang, Tsai, &
Yeh, 2014; Han, 2015; Han, Hsu, & Sheu, 2010), however, because of the theory of planned
behavior is the architecture in the decision of the person is on the basis of rational judgment,
so plan to irrational behavior theory of prediction is relatively weak, and easy for survey
industry characteristics have great differences (Han & Kim, 2010), so this research will add
emotional intelligence and confronting mechanisms, to improve the theory of planned behavior
irrational judgment.
To sum up, the main purpose of this study is to analyze the intentions of university or science
and technology students to invest in the hospitality industry in the future by using the extended
version of planned behavior theory. Most previous studies (e.g., Chang et al., 2020; Frye et al.,
2020; Wen et al., 2019) are mostly on the dependent variable of the emotional intelligence and
confronting mechanism research, rarely came to know that the independent variable, a few
studies on the independent variable of the article (e.g., Mattingly & Kraiger, 2019) study of the
industry, only few for university education is to help follow-up investment industry, so this
study wanted to understand the college or university of science and technology education,
whether to have substantial help to students' future employment, in order to enhance students
into food and beverage industry.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Emotional Intelligence
The concept of emotional intelligence was first proposed by Salovey and Mayer (1990), which
means people's ability to evaluate and regulate their own emotional state. Emotional
intelligence was originally a sub-dimension of social intelligence, which was divided into four
parts, namely emotional cognition, emotional integration, emotional understanding and
emotional management (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2004).On the other hand, Goleman (1998)
believes that emotional intelligence is the combination of ability and personality, that is to say,
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Hsieh, T. C. (2023). Using an Extension of The Theory of Planned Behavior to Explore University Students' Intention to Pursue Career in The
Hospitality Industry. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(7). 35-48.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.107.15024
part of emotional intelligence is innate personality traits, while the other part can be
cultivated.Although there are many different classification methods for the structure of
emotional intelligence, there is a consensus on its definition. Most scholars believe that
emotional intelligence is a person's ability to evaluate and regulate his emotions under
pressure, so as to maintain his best performance (Darvishmotevali, Altinay, & De Vita, 2018;
Wen et al., 2019), according to the above definition, scholars believe that people must be able
to measure and inspect their current emotional state before they can effectively regulate their
emotions and guide their emotions to work with positive effects and productivity.
Emotional intelligence is considered to be one of the most influential job performance and
career loyalty variables (Darvishmotevali et al., 2018), it is particularly important for frontline
staff is, after all, the first line employees must live interaction with customers for long time, the
frontline staff will be responsible for the comfort of the customer's emotions, not only must also
manage their emotions at the same time, especially in the working pressure and disorder of the
workplace environment, must also be smiley face to customers (Wen et al., 2019), more is not
easy,Emotional intelligence can effectively enable employees to cope with their work and social
pressure, and thus achieve better job performance. In this study, it is expected that more future
hospitality workers will be more willing to join the hospitality industry.
Confronting Mechanism
Confronting mechanism refers to a person's ability to cope with external negative factors (Kim
& Agrusa, 2011), the concept of confronting mechanism has been applied in many industry
related research, for example, some studies (Yeh, Aliana, & Zhang, 2012) confronting
mechanism is used to investigate the theme park the tolerance of tourists on the crowded
conditions, the results found that confronting mechanisms will eventually affect the experience,
moreover also respondents were found in the confronting mechanisms, will be less influenced
by external negative factors; confronting mechanisms are also applied to employee-oriented
problems (e.g., Fang, Prayag, Ozanne, & de Vries, 2020; Kim & Agrusa, 2011), the industry long- term employees to face high pressure environment (Frye et al., 2020), that is its ability to
confronting mechanism is very important, some research on some of the more negative
confronting mechanisms, such as the use of smoking as a confronting mechanism (Schantz &
Bruk - Lee, 2016), although also be an effective way to cope with the situation, but has a negative
impact on personal health and life.In addition, some scholars believe that confronting
mechanism is a skill that can be cultivated through training and education (Khan et al., 2019).
Scholars have different opinions on measuring the degree of confronting mechanism. Some
scholars (Avcıoğlu, Karanci, & Soygur, 2019) believe that confronting mechanism is a
relationship after the interaction between people and their environment, so they believe that
people will use confronting mechanism of appropriate environment when facing different
environment.On the other hand, scholars (Gysin-Maillart, Soravia, & Schwab, 2020; VanMeter,
Handley, & Cicchetti, 2020) believe that everyone has his or her own familiar confronting
mechanism, so even in the face of different environmental stimuli, he or she will still choose a
more familiar way to face pressure, which is more consistent with the above theory of
personality traits (Goleman, 1998; Prentice, Zeidan, & Wang, 2020), in other words, personality
traits are highly correlated with the type of confronting mechanism.Whether it is a what kind
of argument, scholars (Avc ı o ğ lu et al., 2019) for the structure of confronting mechanism
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basically have consensus, most think confronting mechanism should be divided into question
for type and mood for type, problems in view of the model is refers to the main attempt in
solving the problem of stress confronting mechanism, while the latter refers to adjust itself
under the stress of facing emotional (Sverdlik, Oreg & Berson, 2020), and subsequent scholars
put forward the third category,It is called avoidant confronting mechanism (Liu, Jiang, & Shi,
2020), which means to cope with environmental pressure by avoiding highpressure
environment. Some people will therefore choose to deal with work they are better at, while
others will directly avoid work. Most scholars (Goleman, 1998; Gysin-Maillart et al., 2020;
Prentice et al., 2020; VanMeter et al., 2020) believes that the first type of confronting
mechanism is positively beneficial to job performance.
Theory of Planned Behavior
Proposed by Ajzen (1991), the theory of planned behavior was originally a research field of
psychology, but in recent years it has been widely applied by the management and tourism
circles in order to understand the decision-making process and behavioral intention of people.
For example, Han and Kim (2010) used the theory of planned behavior to investigate the living
intention of green hotel guests.Theory of planned behavior is extension from the theory of
rational behavior (Ajzen, 1991), its main content is to assume that the decision of the people is
to measure through rational option, then decide whether to engage in some kind of behavior,
and therefore some scholars (Han & Kim, 2010) that the theory of rational behavior and
planned behavior theory, investigate the capability of irrational behavior, for example by
emotions induced behavioral (Yeh, Ma, & Huan, 2016), or impulsive buying behavior (Chung,
Song, & Lee, 2017), etc.Therefore, many scholars (Han, 2015; Han, Meng, & Kim, 2017) will be
expanded when applying the theory of planned behavior to make up for the defects in this
aspect.
Ajzen planned behavior theory and Fishbein (1980) is ultimately want to investigate behavior
intention and behavior intention and think will affect the real behavior, and affect the behavior
intention of three variables, the first pair of variables for behavioral beliefs and attitudes,
behavior refers to men is their belief to take an action after the merits of his judgment, as long
as the judge concluded in the behavior has positive benefits, its attitude towards the behavior
will be positive;The second pair is normative beliefs and subjective norms, that is, whether
people who are important to themselves support their behavior, as long as the surrounding
people also support the behavior, people will form subjective norms, think it is right to engage
in this thing, is recognized by everyone;The last is to control the belief and perceived behavior
control, refers to the people judge in a certain behavior will encounter obstacles, and perceived
behavioral control is whether people think themselves have enough ability and resources to
eliminate the obstacles, when cognitive barriers are relatively low, and sex is relatively high
control ability, to engage in behavior intentions will be higher.
Therefore planned behavior theory with emotional intelligence and confronting mechanism,
this research needs to be the most appropriate choice, first of all, emotional intelligence and
confronting mechanisms are considered relatively mood (D 'Arcy & Teh, 2019) of the decision
factors, so just make up for the shortcoming of the theory of planned behavior, and planned
behavior theory and able to work on the environment factors are negative, for effective
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Hsieh, T. C. (2023). Using an Extension of The Theory of Planned Behavior to Explore University Students' Intention to Pursue Career in The
Hospitality Industry. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(7). 35-48.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.107.15024
systemic analysis, to understand people when deciding whether or not in the industry related
industry concerns the key point.
THE RESEARCH METHODS
Research Structure and Hypothesis
In light of theory of planned behavior is a model of a countless has been verified, and the
proposed model to join in our study, and will add complexity, so this research mainly aims at
the front of the second phase factor, namely attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavior
control, these three factors itself can influence on behavior intention is the (Bashir, Khwaja,
Turi, & Toheed, 2019; Han et al., 2017; Kim, Njite, & Hancer, 2013), however, although the
original theory of planned behavior is not mentioned, many scholars (Chang et al., 2014; Han et
al., 2010) that is subjective norms will influence the attitude, in other words, the public opinion
of something will affect the attitude of the individual, to the logic of this study shows that if
study is around the relatives and friends all think of a career in industry is a good choice, my
attitude towards participation will also become more positive, more than is complete
theoretical framework of establishing original plan behavior.
Second, this study thinks that the degree of emotional intelligence will directly affect the
individual to stress confronting mechanisms (Alhelalat Habiballah, & Twaissi, 2017), with high
emotional intelligence are more effective to deal with differences on social occasions, can also
more rational planning their own behavior (Goldsmith, 2010), therefore, in the face of the social
conflicts in the work environment will be better able to deal with the high tension,They are also
able to put their energies into corrective work (Darvishmotevali et al., 2018; Wen et al., 2019),
thus improving job performance and job satisfaction (Alhelalat et al., 2017; Judge & Bono,
2001).
Many studies have found that social support is a very important spiritual pillar for employees,
especially in the workplace environment. If they are supported by supervisors, their work
intention and performance will increase, and their turnover intention will decrease (Gordon,
Tang, Day, & Adler, 2019; Shamim, Cang, & Yu, 2017), and a study (Atem Bandiera, Ma,
Businelle, & Kendzor, 2016) also found that friends and family in terms of social support can
help individuals to withstand pressure, can even let them kick the use bad way to relieve
pressure (e.g., smoking), so the social support is obvious for confronting mechanism is a
positive correlation, and personal interpretation of social consciousness, is just one part of the
theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991).
Perceptual behavioral control is the perception judgment of individuals to transcend difficulties
and then engage in certain activities (Chang et al., 2014; Han et al., 2010), and this is exactly
what the confronting mechanism can achieve (Avcıoğlu et al., 2019; Khan et al., 2019), in other
words, if the confronting mechanism is improved, the ability of employees to deal with
obstacles and problems will be correspondingly improved. Therefore, this study assumes that.
Pressure and various problems in the workplace are the main reasons why students are not
willing to join the hospitality industry (Frye et al., 2020; Gibbs & Slevitch, 2019; Walsh et al.,
2015), if students' ability to deal with negative things in the workplace can be improved, their
resignation intention can be effectively eliminated and their behavioral intention to join the