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.



Understanding the determinants of employing apprentices: From an economic perspective










First publication for two CMWH PhD students
Opportunities to support our REF preparations
SPROUT Returns: Designing Sustainability in Research Practice – Wednesday 20 May 12-2pm
Innovative Approaches to Doctoral Supervision: Selected Case Studies
3C Event: Research Culture, Community & Canapés-Tuesday 19 May 1-2pm
Apply now to take part in the 2026 ESRC Festival of Social Science
Reminder: Register for the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2026 Information Session
ECR Funding Open Call: Research Culture & Community Grant – Apply now
ECR Funding Open Call: Research Culture & Community Grant – Application Deadline Friday 12 December
MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 Call
ERC Advanced Grant 2025 Webinar
Update on UKRO services
European research project exploring use of ‘virtual twins’ to better manage metabolic associated fatty liver disease