BU Research Blog

NEW PAPER: Stamolampros, P., Korfiatis, N., Chalvatzis, K., Buhalis, D., 2019, Job Satisfaction and Employee Turnover Determinants in High Contact Services: Insights from Employees’ Online Reviews, Tourism Management, Vol.75, Dec. pp.130-147, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2019.04.030

Abstract

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, good custom uniforms, 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.

Highlights

•We use online reviews to evaluate job satisfaction and employee turnover factors for tourism and hospitality firms.
•297,933 employee review ratings and texts for 11,975 U.S tourism and hospitality firms from Glassdoor are analyzed.
•A recent extension of probabilistic topic modeling the Structural Topic Model (STM) is used for the text analysis.
•A one unit increase of the rating for career opportunities decreases the likelihood of an employee to leave by 14.87%.
•An increase by one star in the overall rating of a company is linked with an increase between 1.2 and 1.4 of ROA.