The Relationship between Expectation-Reality Gap and Work Adjustmentin Taiwan Hospitality Industry: The Moderating Role of PerceivedCoworker Support and Supervisor Support

Abstract

noneABSTRACT Attracting and retaining talents in the hospitality industry is a considerable challenge due to the extremely high turnover rate. For new employees, helping them to blend in the new environment and adjust well to a new position are especially important for hospitality practitioners to reduce the new employees' turnover rate. To this end, understanding the difference between new employees' expectations about the organization and what the organization can offer becomes beneficial and meaningful. Therefore, the objective of this study is to delve deeper into the relationship between the new employee expectation-reality gap and work adjustment. Furthermore, perceived coworker support and supervisor support were investigated to see if these two factors have a moderating effect on the relationship between the expectation-reality gap and work adjustment. The convenient and purposive sampling approach was adopted to reach participants and an online self-reported survey was designed to collect the data. The collected data was analyzed using Mplus and SPSS software. Descriptive analysis, correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis were performed to describe participants’ demographic profiles and test the hypotheses of this study. The findings show a significant negative relationship between expectation-reality gap and work adjustment. In terms of moderating effect, both perceived coworker support and perceived supervisor support strengthen the negative relationship between expectation-reality gap and work adjustment.