Workplace Environment, Leader Communication and Hotel Employee Retention: Job Satisfaction as a Mediator

Every organisation has invested its time, effort and resources to recruit, train and pay employees’ salaries. These investments are important to ensure that the organisation can produce high-quality employees who will remain with the organisation for a long period of time and be part of the successful members of the service team. Although a lot has been done to ensure that employees remain with the organisation, research has found that employee retention remains to be a problem to most organisations. In validating whether the findings from past studies are still consistent with the present situation, the present research aims to further investigate whether work environment, leader communication and job satisfaction still present significant relationships with hotel employee retention. In total, 550 self-administered questionnaires were distributed to hotel employees attached to 3-star and 4-star hotels located in Klang Valley, Malaysia. Of the total being distributed, 329 were returned and considered usable for data analysis. The hypothesised relationships between variables were tested using the multiple regression analysis. The findings reveal that workplace environment, leader communication and job satisfaction are significantly related to hotel employee retention. The results also demonstrate that job satisfaction mediates the relationship between workplace environment, leader communication and employee retention. The findings of this research advance the understanding of employee retention and create awareness among hotel management to better appreciate the dimensions of transformation which are essential towards ensuring employee job satisfaction. This will consequently lead to a long-term employee retention. Apart from the findings, the paper also highlights the limitations and suggestions for future research. Keywords: Workplace environment, leader communication, job satisfaction, employee retention, hotel industry.

Listening to your employees: analyzing opinions from online reviews of hotel companies

Purpose This study aims to examine the factors influencing hotel employee satisfaction and explores the different sentiments expressed in these factors in online reviews by hotel type (premium versus economy) and employment status (current versus former). Design/methodology/approach A total of 78,535 online reviews by employees of 29 hotel companies for the period of 2011-2019 were scraped from Indeed.com. Structural topic modeling (STM) and sentiment analysis were used to extract topics influencing employee satisfaction and examine differences in sentiments in each topic. Findings Results showed that employees of premium hotels expressed more positive sentiments in their reviews than employees of economy hotels. The STM results demonstrated that 20 topics influenced employee satisfaction, the top three of which were workplace bullying and dirty work (18.01%), organizational support (16.29%) and career advancement (8.88%). The results indicated that the sentiments in each topic differed by employment status and hotel type. Practical implications Rather than relying on survey data to explore employee satisfaction, hotel industry practitioners can analyze employees’ online reviews to design action plans. Originality/value This study is one of only a few to use online reviews from an employment search engine to explore hotel employee satisfaction. This study found that workplace bullying and dirty work heavily influenced employee satisfaction. Moreover, analysis of the comments from previous employees identified antecedents of employees’ actual turnover behavior but not their turnover intention.