How Digitalization in Tourism Led to Moral Disengagement of Employees: Differential Impacts on X, Y, Z Generations in Egyptian Hotels

Abstract

The recent global trend towards digitalization is causing a lot of economic, political and social changes to all world populations and states. From travel agencies to Online Travel Agencies (OTA’s) in Tourism and from Central Reservation Offices (CRO’s) to Global Distribution Networks (GDS) in hospitality business, this is how the world changed. Even social media is converting from Facebook to Metaverse and from Two Dimentional (2D) to Virtual Reality (VR) and Virtual Augmented Reality (VAR) besides to holograms. Many researches explored the impacts of digitalization on these perspectives. However, few if any were focused to measure the shift in moral models adopted due to this shift in life, from physical to digital. This paper targets to explore the moral disengagement caused by the aforementioned trend on employees from different generations “x, y and z” concerning total performance, reputation, present and future image of hospitality business operations and how is this perceived among them and the role of accumulated experience to mitigate these impacts. Keywords: digitalization, x, y, z generations, moral disengagement, immoral decisions, reputation, total performance, present and future image, accumulated experience