Linchi Kwok, Ph.D.

Forget about the old days of “people serving people.” More restaurants and hotels are now using robotic cooks, delivery robots, self-serving kiosks, Chatbots, and other AI-empowered machines in service operations.   Some businesses must rely on machines to address the labor shortage issue. Others count on machines to deliver faster and more consistent service. Moreover, many consumers have become used to automatic self-services during the pandemic. It is not surprising to see robots taking over more service jobs.      What is the latest robotic “thing” that deems to take over even more human jobs?     That is ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the popular chatbot from OpenAI. Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT is designed to answer user requests with AI-generated articles, essays, jokes, and even poetry. By January 2023, ChatGPT was already set to reach 100 million monthly active users ( Hu, 2023 ). On average, about 13 million unique visito...

The U.S. Department of The Treasury spent trillions of dollars during COVID to help people and businesses in need. Without those emergency funds from the government, many hospitality businesses would not have survived the pandemic. Now, our world is finally getting away from the pandemic. However, many crises facing the hospitality industry are not over yet. We still need help to address the supply chain issues, labor shortage, record-high inflation, and looming concerns of the economy. Should the government continue its support?      Natural gas may be one of the urgent issues needing the government’s help right now.     There is a spike in natural gas prices in Southern California. For example, a family-owned BBQ and seafood restaurant in L.A.’s Chinatown found its natural gas bill went from a typical $5,000 - $6,000 to nearly $14,000 in February 2023 ( Quednow & Cheng, 2023 ).     The Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has urged the Federal R...

The positive effects of employees’ trust in their supervisors have been widely documented, such as job engagement, performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors. Given supervisors’ authority in the workplace, we suspect supervisors would bear a critical role in initiating trusting supervisor-employee relationships. As suggested in the social exchange theory, employees may perceive supervisor trust in them as a kind act by the supervisor and feel obligated to return such a kind act with their trust in supervisor.     The Research     To examine the relationships among (supervisor) trust in employee, (employee) felt trust, and (employee) trust in supervisor with empirical data, I worked with Drs.   Yung-Kuei Huang   at National Ilan University in Taiwan and   Ning-Kuang Chuang   at Kent State University on a project. Our purpose is two-fold.      1.       To examine the mediating relationships among trust i...