Anomia and Displacement of Responsibility as Determinants of Tourist Company Managers’ Non-Involvement in Alleviating Poverty

Abstract

The economic transformation produced by tourism sometimes has a positive influence on reducing poverty, but other times it does not. Discovering the reasons for this difference is highly relevant. In searching for these reasons, this study will focus on an important actor in tourism management, the manager. Specifically, the study will analyze how a certain negative mood state, anomia, influences the fact that managers do not consider it advisable for their companies to become involved in reducing poverty. The term future managers has been used as a proxy variable for managers. In addition, the study will also examine whether a moral disengagement mechanism, displacement of responsibility, is a mediator variable in this relationship. Covariance-based structural equation modeling was applied to a sample of 422 students in their last year of the Tourism degree at two universities, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain) and Ibn-Zohr-Agadir (Morocco). The results show that all the proposed hypotheses are supported.