The tourism and hospitality industry are fast transitioning into a people-centrist industry that requires graduates with the requisite industry-specific soft skills. Affective learning has been recognized among hospitality professionals as an avenue through which students’ personal and emotional needs can be fulfilled, raising their perceptions of acquisition of desired skills. Despite associating the affective learning domain with the development of soft skills, scholars have failed to demonstrate the contribution of individual affective domain levels to students perceived acquisition of such skills. Therefore, this paper leverages the humanistic theory of learning to establish determinants of the responding level of the affective domain and their implications to perceived acquisition of soft skills. A sample of 262 second and third-year diploma students in tourism and hospitality courses were conveniently drawn from institutions in Nairobi County. The paper uses the PLS-SEM framework to show that active participation, complying with phenomena, and reacting to stimuli are significant determinants of the responding level in tourism and hospitality diploma training. In addition, the paper demonstrates that the responding level effects are positive and significant predictors of perceived acquisition of soft skills among tourism and hospitality diploma students. The paper concludes that the responding level of the affective domain provides tourism and hospitality institutions with the opportunity to tailor their diploma programs and objectives towards experiential learning and development of industry-specific soft skills. An expanded scope of tourism and hospitality diploma students is, however, likely to enhance external validity of the findings.
Keywords: Determinants, Soft Skills, affective learning, perceived acquisition, responding level
