Hospitality employees inevitably face emotional exhaustion when performing their jobs. The purpose of this study was to investigate dispositional antecedents of hospitality employees’ emotional exhaustion, including self-instability, pessimism, and affect variability, and how employees’ affect variability mediates the relations between self-instability and pessimism and emotional exhaustion. In addition, we explored the moderating role of positive work reflection on the relation between affect variability and emotional exhaustion. A total of 224 frontline employees in 18 four- and five-star hotels in Ecuador responded to surveys about their emotions and work lives. The findings suggest that (a) emotional exhaustion was influenced by affect variability, (b) affect variability mediated the relations between self-instability and pessimism and emotional exhaustion, and (c) the relation between affect variability and emotional exhaustion was weakened by positive work reflection. The results highlight the importance of potential low-cost and easily trainable interventions that could help in attenuating the negative effects of highly variable emotions and the resulting exhaustion that are prevalent in the hospitality industry. This research is among the first to examine the dispositional antecedents of emotional exhaustion, and the first to highlight the role of positive work reflection as a moderating variable that can buffer the negative effect of affect variability on emotional exhaustion.

La infraestructura, modernización y crecimiento modular que ha experimentado el anterior aeropuerto Simón Bolívar, conocido ahora como José Joaquín de Olmedo, desde la inauguración de su nueva terminal en julio de 2006, ha permitido que muchas aerolíneas encuentren atractivo el hacer de éste, su centro de conexiones internacionales, lo que a su vez ha permitido que el incremento del número de llegadas y salidas de visitantes que arriban al Ecuador, se produzcan desde la ciudad de Guayaquil. A partir de una investigación de tipo descriptiva y cumpliendo las normas de la autoridad aeroportuaria, se aplicaron encuestas aleatorias a turistas extranjeros que salieron desde Guayaquil, luego de visitar Ecuador, encontrándose que muchos de ellos realizaron su viaje por actividades relacionadas con su tiempo libre o negocios. El resultado de este estudio permitió determinar su percepción, intereses, probabilidad de retorno, recomendación del destino y otros datos relacionados, sobre la experiencia previa y posterior de su visita al país.

Un estudio de la conducta y la ejecución de lectura en dos mil seiscientos estudiantes en cinco universidades en Ecuador encontró que su conducta y ejecución de lectura era mejor que la de estudiantes en los Estados Unidos, aún con los retos que existen en la educación superior ecuatoriana. Se incluyen sugerencias para investigaciones futuras, con respecto en particular a mejorar la habilidad del manejo del tiempo de los estudiantes como forma de incrementar su ejecución de lectura.

Cultural tightness-looseness represents the degree to which a particular culture possesses strong behavioral norms, and the degree to which members of that culture are likely to sanction individuals who deviate from those norms. While tightness-looseness has been quantified for a large and growing number of countries around the world, there are many countries where a tightness-looseness score has yet to be determined, thus impeding the inclusion of those countries in cross-cultural research with a tightness-looseness focus. There is a dearth of research on cultural tightness-looseness in South America in particular. We report results from a national survey of 1,265 Ecuadorian residents which provided quantification of the relatively tight culture of Ecuador.