Engage more and burnout less through love! Examining the mechanism of hotel department managers’ brand love and health

With the emerging trend of brand love studies in hospitality branding literature, the scope of related research has expanded from analyzing customers’ to employees’ perspectives. Through the lens of social identity theory and conservation of resources theory, this study takes a novel perspective on hotel department managers’ brand love, investigating how outcomes of managers’ brand love influence their health. Data was collected from 324 hotel department managers in the U.S. Findings show that brand love can foster managers’ work engagement and positive affect, improving their perceived health. Meanwhile, although managers’ burnout leads to work-family conflict that harms their health, their brand love and work engagement can ease their perceived burnout. Taken together, this is meaningful to find that hotel managers’ brand love can significantly foster positive outcomes toward health and mitigate adverse effects on health.