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

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

Employee satisfaction during the pandemic in the tourism and hospitality industries

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected employee satisfaction in Tourism and Hospitality industries? This paper uses a topic modelling approach to explore the pandemic effects utilizing a large sample (N = 733,746) of employee-generated online reviews. Comparing online employee feedback during the pandemic to the pre-pandemic period, the study indicates a shift in topics discussed, suggesting changes in employee satisfaction drivers. During the pandemic, there was a noticeable increase in positive discussions regarding work stress, customer behaviour, and managerial practices. Work-life balance and management behaviour were found to be more closely linked to increased dissatisfaction, whereas employee treatment, working environment, and company culture were associated with higher satisfaction levels. The present study contributes to the understanding of employee satisfaction in tourism and hospitality services as the first to measure the impact of COVID-19 by harnessing the power of online employee user-generated content providing practical implications for theory and employee practice

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

Exploring the behavioral drivers of review valence: The direct and indirect effects of multiple psychological distances

Purpose Although the literature has established the effect of online reviews on customer purchase intentions, the influence of psychological factors on online ratings is overlooked. This paper aims to examine these factors under the perspective of construal level theory (CLT). Design/methodology/approach Using review data from TripAdvisor and Booking.com, the authors study three dimensions of psychological distances (temporal, spatial and social) and their direct and interaction effects on review valence, using regression analysis. The authors examine the effect of these distances on the information content of online reviews using a novel bag-of-words model to assess its concreteness. Findings Temporal distance and spatial distance have positive direct effects on review valence. Social distance, on the other hand, has a negative direct effect. However, its interaction with the other two distances has a positive effect, suggesting that consumers tend to “zoom-out” to less concrete things in their ratings. Practical implications The findings provide implications for the interpretation of review ratings by the service providers and their information content. Originality/value This study extends the CLT and electronic word-of-mouth literature by jointly exploring the effect of all three psychological distances that are applicable in post-purchase evaluations. Methodologically, it provides a novel application of the bag-of-words model in evaluating the concreteness of online reviews

Augmenting Household Expenditure Forecasts with Online Employee-generated Company Reviews

We assess the ability of online employee-generated content in predicting consumption expenditures. In so doing, we aggregate millions of employee expectations for the next six-month business outlook of their employer and build an employee sentiment index. We test whether forward-looking employee sentiment can contribute to baseline models when forecasting aggregate consumption in the United States and compare its performance to well-established, survey-based consumer sentiment indexes. We reveal that online employee opinions have incremental information that can be used to augment the accuracy of consumption forecasting models and inform economic policy decisions

Employees’ online reviews and equity prices

We examine the effect of employee satisfaction on corporate performance using employees’ online reviews. Our results indicate that although employee satisfaction positively impacts corporate performance, this is not fully reflected in equity prices

Evaluating domestic bias on airline passengers’ ratings: The moderating effect of cultural value orientation

We explore differences in airline passengers’ online ratings toward domestic and foreign carriers. Using a dataset of more than 380,000 airline passenger reviews obtained from TripAdvisor, we show that on average passengers express higher satisfaction (as proxied by their overall rating) for airline service encounters with domestic carriers, exhibiting a form of domestic bias. Using Hofstede’s framework, we examine how cultural dimensions influence the strength of this bias and find support for the moderating impact (positive and negative) of passengers’ cultural dimensions on their provided ratings toward domestic airlines. The study has theoretical and practical implications for international marketing researchers and airline operational planners