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Managers deal with various unethical employee behaviors at work, including theft, disclosure of confidential information, misusage of products and services, bullying, etc. (Teng & Chen, 2021). Among that, employee theft has become a serious and challenging issue for all businesses, such as retail (Kelkar & Emilus, 2016), technology (Cunningham et al., 2018), hospitals (Otiso & Mutugi, 2018), aviation (Vatankhah et al., 2017). This issue led to inventory shrinkage, draining the company’s profits, reducing return on investment, and higher prices for customers (Kelkar & Emilus, 2016). It also affects the companies' sustainability by the financial unitability, unhealthy labor forces and negative impact on the stakeholders. According to the Office of National Statistics (2020), 67% of British office staff admitted that they steal from their office, which leads to a total loss of at least £190 million. Similarly, a report in the US indicated that 33% of business bankruptcies were caused by employee theft in 2020. In the hotel industry, there is a high contact service nature of the job; employees are tempted to steal. Hotel employees can easily access a large amount of cash, tangible amenities, and other food and beverage items, so theft becomes an unavoidable issue and hard to eliminate (Sarwar & Muhammad, 2020). This will affect business activities and financial performance and detract investors and shareholders from doing business in the industry (Matti & Ross, 2016). However, managers are often unaware of effective methods to alleviate employee theft or even refuse to confront the problem and punish the bad employees since they are afraid it might negatively affect their image (Chen & Sandino, 2012). Thus, the issue has not been brought up to the public until now. Previous studies have been carried out on employee theft, and researchers have found some antecedents of the behavior including, employee dissatisfaction (Goh & Kong, 2018), unjust treatment (Moorthy et al., 2015), lack of control system (Kennedy, 2015), personality (Shigihara, 2013), and other. However, there is still a need for a comprehensive study on employee theft behavior in the hotel industry.
Vietnam has been rated as an attractive tourism destination, which welcomes many visitors from all over the world. The country has about 30.000 accommodation organizations offering more than 650.000 rooms. There is a high demand for employees working in the hotel industry. However, the industry is dealing with many human resource issues, such as a high percentage of hourly waged employees, stressful working environment, low compensation and benefit, lack of the proper training and education, etc. Employees are having a dilemma of conducting theft behavior as an encounter for the above issues. However, there is no exclusive study on employee theft in the Vietnamese hotel industry. There is an increasing demand to understand the issues as academicians and hotel managers witness the significant negative impacts on the hotel business. The main objective of this study is to investigate the factors affecting employee theft behavior in the hotel industry in Vietnam and the moderating effect of the internal control system. Mainly, this study focuses on answering the following questions: 1. What are the antecedents of employee theft behavior in Vietnamese hotels? and 2. What is the effect of the internal control system in reducing this issue?