The Effect of Sustainable Human Resource Management Practices on Customer Satisfaction, Service Quality, and Institutional Performance in Hotel Businesses
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The title of the manuscript is interesting and has importance for HR practitioners. Following these suggestions would enhance the quality of the manuscript.
- The introduction of the paper did not adequately address the research gap and novelty of the paper. In addition, the introduction should include a brief synopsis of the methodology and findings.
- Reorganize your literature review in connection with your hypothesis.
- The methodology did not adequately discuss the analytical framework and the supporting arguments for a particular analytical framework (the strength of the chosen method and the limitations of similar other methods).
- The study is not supported by any theory, which is the main limitation of this paper.
- Conclusions need to be separated from research limitations and practical and theoretical implications.
- Overall, the contribution and novelty of the paper are not highlighted in the introduction, literature review, and conclusion sections.
7. Use either researches or studies in the following sentence
“The aforementioned researches studies did not take into consideration institutional performance in terms of customer satisfaction and staff service quality”.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
please find the answers regarding you cooments.
Kindly regards,
Sofia Anastasiadou
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript examines the impact of sustainable human resource practices on customer satisfaction, hotel service quality, and hotel performance of the case hotel, Cypriot inter-city industry of hotels, which has certain practicality. However, the manuscript has the following problems, hoping to help the author to make better amendments.
1. In the Introduction, the author briefly introduces the current situation of Cyprus's tourism industry but lacks sufficient exploration. In other words, the manuscript mentions that "... faces enormous hurdles because of the unpredictable and constantly altering the outside setting in which it functions..." the same applies to the hotel industry in each region, so what is the reason why the author chooses the Cypriot intercity industry of hotels?
2. It seems that the authors are studying the impact of sustainable HR practices on three different dependent variables. From the Methodology section, I did not see the author's targeted understanding of customer satisfaction, hotel service quality, and hotel performance. The author combined some commonly used models and measurement items of the three variables. Will this affect each other? How does the author avoid the "1+1+1<3 "risk?
3. The practical value of the manuscript may be outstanding, but it lacks theoretical value, "this study investigated the effect of core organizational competencies such as HRM and service quality on customers' happiness and company success in Cyprus intercity hotel industry "This is not enough. Similar conclusions have been common knowledge in the field of HRM research, and there are also rich research results in the hospitality field. I do not think the manuscript has a prominent contribution in this regard, especially since the author does not explain the particularity of the case hotel.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
please find attached the file with the anwers to your comments.
Kind regards,
SofIa Anastasiadou
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper is overall well structured and well organized. I have a couple of minor comments:
In the introduction section, authors need to do a better job in highlighting the contribution made by this study in terms of both theoretical relevance and practical implications. In its current form, the value addition seems just marginal. In the introduction section, you need to do a better job in providing a clear justification of why did you choose these specific constructs.
authors should add a theoretical background section to further support their proposed model. In the theoretical background, authors need to use some relevant theory/theories and discuss its/their key assumptions to support the proposed conceptual model.
See and mention the below papers, that can be of help in restructuring your introduction and discussion sections:
Effect of CSR activities on meaningfulness, compassion, and employee engagement: A sense-making theoretical approach." International Journal of Hospitality Management
Customer engagement in the service context: An empirical investigation of the construct, its antecedents and consequences. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services,
Present an improved set of theoretical and practical implications.
Good luck with this piece of work!
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
thank yoy very much for your comments.
Please find our riplies to your comments in the attched file.
Kindly regards,
Sofia Anastasiadou
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 4 Report
Thank you for the opportunity to review this manuscript. I think the manuscript has some value, however, how it has been laid out limits its readability and obfuscates its contribution to the literature. Below are some improvements that should be made to help make it easier to evaluate the scientific contribution of the paper. I wish the authors all the best in making such changes. Note that the following points are made as I went through the manuscript, not in order of importance.
Line 86 - this reads a bit strange - perhaps remove the first sentence
The literature review begins by saying that it is divided into four sections, however, there are no sub-headings to help see which parts go into which areas. I suggest adding in sub-headings into the literature review section.
Line 116, you cannot begin a sentence with "[38] conducted..." You could use the authors surname(s) and then put the numbered reference.
Same for the methodology section where authors write things like "according to [71]" - that doesn't make sense.
Line 208 - how can one "humbly demand" something? Perhaps "requested" might be more appropriate
Lines 217-218 - while there are other instances in the manuscript, this is a clear example of defining something that is not needed. Skip straight to the ethical considerations for the study.
Did the study receive ethics approval? Or was this not required due to an organisational policy? It would be good to confirm either way and state details as the study involves human participants.
The authors should provide the full survey as it was administered to participants as an appendix. If it was administered in a language other than English, then the authors should provide the survey in both the original language and English. This is important for ensuring replicability.
I am concerned that the measures have been designed in such a way that participants are forced to have opinions on topics that they may have never thought about prior to doing the study. This is the issue of self-generated validity. The authors should provide this as a potential limitation of the study and should comment on this. Below are two sources that are useful for addressing this comment:
Feldman, J. M., & Lynch, J. G. (1988). Self-generated validity and other effects of measurement on belief, attitude, intention, and behavior. Journal of applied Psychology, 73(3), 421.
Forbes, S., & Avis, M. (2020). Construct creation from research questions. European Journal of Marketing, 54(8), 1817-1838.
The tables should be text editable - they appear to be screenshots as you can see the red underlines from Microsoft Word on what it thinks are spelling mistakes. The tables are not easy to navigate - there should be commentary for readers on how to interpret them and they should be laid out in a more professional manner.
The results are also not laid out in a manner that makes for inteligibility. As a reviewer, I find these hard to evaluate or critique because they are difficult to navigate what is being said. Can the authors please find some cleverer ways of laying out the results to improve readability? Then it will be easier to evaluate the scientific contribution of the paper.
Why is there no discussion section? There is a very short conclusion section, but this does not compare or contrast with literature or discuss any implications for theory, research, or practice. This could be improved upon.
I would suggest limitations and future research be a separate section with its own heading after the conclusion section. This should also be expanded with some discussion of the aforementioned issue of self-generated validity.
There are some strange phraseologies used in places, but overall the English is intelligible and corrections could be made by copyeditors.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
thank you for your corrections.
I reply to all your comments.
Pleased see the replies in thw attached file.
Kind regards,
Sofia Anastasiadou
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
A significant improvements have been done by the authors. Following are some suggestions for further improvement.
· - Introduction is yet to be developed addressing research uniqueness and implications.
· - Methodology did not include analytical techniques (model, software, version….) with its merits and limitations.
· - Absence of theoretical framework is the major shortcomings of this manuscript. Authors tried to add a conceptual framework only which is not supported by any theory.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
please find the anwers to your comments.
Kind regards,
Sofia Anastasiadou
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Through the revised manuscript, I think the authors have made a detailed explanation and correction for the previous revision suggestions. The final manuscript has met the criteria for publication.
Author Response
Dear reviwer,
thank yoy very much for your cooments.
Best regards,
Sofia Anastasi;adoy
Reviewer 4 Report
Thank you for the the opportunity to review the revised version of this manuscript. I think the revised version is greatly improved, however, I do have one comment that I think warrants further revision.
Lines 255 - 273 present some statements that are questionable at best regarding quantitative vs qualitative approaches and is heavily biased towards quantitative. For example, the authors suggest that quantitative research is not subject to bias - that is simply untrue - quantitative researchers can load statistics or gear questions to find particular things if they want to, in the same way that a qualitative researcher can bias their analysis of data. Qualitative data can also be quantified, for example, coding participants as in or out of themes and then statistically testing whether being in a theme is correlated with particular demographic groupings. The authors should remove these lines as written because they are simply not factual. The key argumentation would be generalisability of data over richness of data, the easiness of replication (qualitative research can be replicated, it is just more cumbersome), the easiness of data collection, and the ability to apply more sophisticated forms of quantitative analysis. These points are far more defensible than what is written in the revised version of the manuscript. Without looking at the sources the authors cite for the current statements, one would have to wonder whether they are referring interpretivist qualitative approaches for which the statements would apply, with positivist qualitative approaches for which they would not.
Still some minor grammatical issues that need to be fixed - these can probably be done at the copy-editing phase
Author Response
Dear reviwer,
please find the anwers to your comments.
Besrt regards,
Sofia Anastasiadou
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
