Internal Branding, Communication and Commitment as Pathways to Healthcare Employees’ Digital Promotion of Cultural Tourism

Private healthcare organizations increasingly compete on their internal culture and on how consistently that culture reaches patients, particularly in destinations where treatment and cultural tourism overlap. Organizational communication and internal branding are established antecedents of employee commitment, but whether they are also associated with employees’ digital behavior has not been examined. This study extends a communication–branding–commitment framework by adding employees’ digital engagement in cultural tourism promotion (EDCTP), a newly developed measure, as a distal outcome. A structured questionnaire was completed by 247 professionals in three private healthcare institutions in Greece. Confirmatory factor analysis, correlation analysis, multiple regression, and bootstrapped mediation analysis were used. Organizational communication and internal branding were both positively associated with employee commitment, and internal branding partially mediated the communication–commitment relationship. Commitment was the strongest predictor of digital engagement and partially mediated the associations of both communication and branding with this outcome. Given the cross-sectional design, these relationships are interpreted as associations rather than causal effects. The findings suggest that healthcare managers who wish to encourage employees’ voluntary digital promotion should treat communication and internal branding as complementary rather than interchangeable levers.