The Relationship Between Employee Attitudes in the Pygmalion Effect and Trust in Supervisors: A Study on Hotel Establishments

Regardless of the type of business, the common goal of every establishment is to make sustainable profits and thus to ensure its continuity. In the service sector, which also includes tourism establishments, where social relations and labor power are intense, the productivity and profitability of establishments completely depend on the human factor. For this reason, the managers in these establishments want to get the highest benefit from the employees and they enter into an expectation in this direction. Managers who expect employees to show higher performance reveal these expectations by showing interest to their employees. This situation is referred to as the “Pygmalion effect” in the literature. On the other hand, in addition to this effect, the trust of the employees in their supervisors plays an important role in increasing the productivity in the establishments. The aim of this study is to reveal the relationship/effect between the attitudes of employees working in hotels towards the Pygmalion effect and their level of trust in the supervisor. This study only covers employees of four-star and five-star hotels operating in Istanbul. In the study, only the Pygmalion effect and trust in the supervisor variables of the participants were discussed, and other forms of organizational behavior were not focused on. The important factor here is the resources and transportation allocated to the study, especially time limitation. Questionnaire technique was used as a data collection tool, and 423 usable questionnaires were obtained from four-star and five-star hotels operating in Istanbul. According to the findings obtained from the analysis of the data, it was found that the participants' perception of the Pygmalion effect and their level of trust in the supervisor were high. When the relations and effects between the variables were examined, it was observed that there were weak relationships between the attitudes in the Pygmalion effect of the participants and their level of trust in the supervisor. On the other hand, it was determined that there was a very weak relationship between Pygmalion effect attitude in the “general self-efficacy (GSE)” dimension and trust in the supervisor, a very weak relationship between the Pygmalion effect attitude in the “managerial self-efficacy (MSE)” dimension and trust in the supervisor, and a weak relationship between the Pygmalion effect attitude in the “Pygmalion Attitude Index (PAI)” dimension and trust in the supervisor.