Social interactions in organisations: Investigating employee quiet quitting using spatial econometric methods

Social interactions play a crucial role in organisations with intensive human contact, such as the hospitality industry. These interactions can be translated into crossover effects that affect employees' emotions and behaviours, which enlarge individual behaviours' impact on the whole organisation. However, these effects tend to be neglected across co-workers due to the difficulty of capturing and measuring using traditional methods. This study extends the crossover theory by incorporating co-workers’ social interactions in understanding organisational behaviour, operationalised by introducing advanced spatial econometric methods into hospitality management and organisational behaviour studies. This analytical framework is applied to understand quiet quitting behaviour with the presence of social interactions from a new perspective. The findings confirmed the existence of crossovers in employees' quiet quitting behaviours within organisations. The generalisability of this methodological framework can make further contributions to understanding a wide range of organisational behaviours considering social interactions in the workplace.