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Article History

Received: 17 October 2024

Accepted: 9 March 2026

First Online: 3 April 2026

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: The authors followed the Ethical Code of Conduct of the American Psychological Association (APA) to conduct this study. All procedures involved in studies involving human subjects were in line with the ethical norms of the institutional research committees. The study was in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the participants were provided with written informed consent. This study was approved (22/09/2021) by the Institutional Review Board of Jiangsu University, Independent Ethics Committee (No. UJS/SM/204). A professor from Jiangsu University’s School of Management supervised this research work. Also, ethical clearance was sought from the Ghana Tourism Authority, in line with the requirements of Article 23 of Helsinki, before conducting the study. All procedures involved in the data collection of this study were in line with the ethical norms of the Ethical Review Committee (TTU/ERC/21/021) of Takoradi Technical University, and were approved to ensure that ethical procedures were adhered to during data collection.

: How: All informed consent was obtained in written form (see uploaded Informed Consent Sheet). When: The informed consent was obtained on the day of the visitation to the selected companies. The research team sought written consent on 07/08/2021 from Management, and Management communicated with the employees before meeting them. In total, we visited 20 hotel companies in seven regions. A micro workshop was conducted for each company we visited between August 2021 and September 2021. During the introduction of the workshops, participants were introduced to research ethics and data collection, the context, and the planning (timeline, schedule, etc.) of the workshop. Participants also received a packet containing a unique, randomized ID and an informed consent sheet. It covered information on data use and consent to publish the results. By Whom: The informed consent was obtained by the research team that facilitated the workshops. From whom: In total, 701 participants took part in the 20 workshops. Among the participants were the frontline employees, i.e., front‒desk agents, bartenders, waiters or waitresses, and bell attendants, etc. Scope of the consent: Here is the Informed Consent Form that was handed out to each participant. The marked placeholders were filled in by the project partner before handing out the consent form.