Job satisfaction and employee turnover determinants in high contact services: Insights from Employees'Online reviews

We explore a special case of electronic word of mouth that of employees' online reviews to study the determinants of job satisfaction and employee turnover. We perform our analysis using a novel dataset of 297,933 employee online reviews from 11,975 US tourism and hospitality firms, taking advantage of both the review score and text. Leadership and cultural values are found to be better predictors of high employee satisfaction, while career progression is critical for employee turnover. One unit increase in the rating for career progression reduces the likelihood of an employee to leave a company by 14.87%. Additionally, we quantify the effect of job satisfaction on firm profitability, where one unit increase leads to an increase between 1.2 and 1.4 in ROA. We do not find evidence supporting the reverse relationship, that growth on firm profitability increases job satisfaction. The feedback to management in employee reviews provides specific managerial implications

Laboratory Studies of Air Stripping of VOC-Contaminated Soils

ABSTRACT: Bench-scale laboratory experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of air stripping for in situ remediation of benzene-contaminated soils. Several parametric studies were performed to evaluate the effect of soil grain size, air injection flow rate, and air inlet temperature on the benzene recovery efficiency. An increase in soil grain size produced a significant increase in benzene recovery efficiency especially during the early stages of air injection. After 2 h of treatment, an increase in soil grain size from D 50 = 0.31 mm to D 50 = 1.20 mm resulted in an increase in benzene recovery efficiency from 49 to 65%. When the air-flow rate was increased from 5 l/min to 10 l/min, the benzene recovery efficiency increased from 56 to 70% after 4 h of venting operation. Maximum recovery of benzene was reached after approximately 37 h of soil venting at a flow rate of 5 l/min and after approximately 24 h at a flow rate of 10 l/min. Preheating the air to 45°C at the inlet resulted in an increase in recovery efficiency from 70 to 90% after 5 h of air stripping

Front- and Back-End Employee Satisfaction during Service Transition

Purpose Scholars studying servitization argue that manufacturers moving into services need to develop new job roles or modify existing ones, which must be enacted by employees with the right mentality, skill sets, attitudes and capabilities. However, there is a paucity of empirical research on how such changes affect employee-level outcomes. Design/methodology/approach The authors theorize that job enrichment and role stress act as countervailing forces during the manufacturer's service transition, with implications for employee satisfaction. The authors test the hypotheses using a sample of 21,869 employees from 201 American manufacturers that declared revenues from services over a 10-year period. Findings The authors find an inverted U-shaped relationship between the firm's level of service infusion and individual employee satisfaction, which is flatter for front-end staff. This relationship differs in shape and/or magnitude between firms, highlighting the role of unobserved firm-level idiosyncratic factors. Practical implications Servitized manufacturers, especially those in the later stage of their transition (i.e. when services start to account for more than 50% of annual revenues), should try to ameliorate their employees' role-induced stress to counter a drop in satisfaction. Originality/value This is one of the first studies to examine systematically the relationship between servitization and individual employee satisfaction. It shows that back-end employees in manufacturing firms are considerably affected by an increasing emphasis on services, while past literature has almost exclusively been concerned with front-end staff

Ranking online consumer reviews

YesProduct reviews are posted online by the hundreds and thousands for popular products. Handling such a large volume of continuously generated online content is a challenging task for buyers, sellers and researchers. The purpose of this study is to rank the overwhelming number of reviews using their predicted helpfulness scores. The helpfulness score is predicted using features extracted from review text, product description, and customer question-answer data of a product using the random-forest classifier and gradient boosting regressor. The system classifies reviews into low or high quality with the random-forest classifier. The helpfulness scores of the high-quality reviews are only predicted using the gradient boosting regressor. The helpfulness scores of the low-quality reviews are not calculated because they are never going to be in the top k reviews. They are just added at the end of the review list to the review-listing website. The proposed system provides fair review placement on review listing pages and makes all high-quality reviews visible to customers on the top. The experimental results on data from two popular Indian e-commerce websites validate our claim, as 3–4 newer high-quality reviews are placed in the top ten reviews along with 5–6 older reviews based on review helpfulness. Our findings indicate that inclusion of features from product description data and customer question-answer data improves the prediction accuracy of the helpfulness score.Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India for financial support during research work through “Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme for Electronics and IT”

Airline service quality and economic factors: An ARDL approach on US airlines

This study examines the impact of interest rates, fuel prices, and market concentration on airline service performance. Rather than focusing on an airline-level analysis, we employ aggregated data from the US Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Airline Consumer Report (ACR) to explore four airline service performance metrics, namely: on-time performance, cancelled flights, mishandled baggage, and passenger's complaints. We gauge the long run effect of the variables of interest using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag bound approach. The findings reveal long-term linkages between airline service levels and the variation in interest rates and market concentration providing new evidence on the trade-off relation between financial pressures and service quality and has practical implications for both regulators and airline managers. Our results are robust to business cycle effects including the great recession