A study of diversified hospitality workers affecting employee job satisfaction and its relationship to employee retention in the lodging industry

Scope and method of study. The purpose of this study was to identify individual characteristics that would affect the level of association between overall job satisfaction and intention to remain at the current workplace for U.S. and non-U.S. (foreign) workers. Perceptions of hotel workers toward workforce diversity also were studied to identify factors that would help employers provide better work environments and increase employee job satisfaction. A two-stage sampling, judgment sampling initially was applied to this study in order to select participating hotel properties. Exploratory factor analysis was initiated to identify the dimensions of attributes of job satisfaction among diverse hotel workers. Five extracted job satisfaction factors were “work environment,” “ work itself,” “supervision,” “ compensation,” and “personal status,” and the factor that was extracted from four workforce attributes was labeled as “satisfaction with workforce diversity.” Multiple regression analysis was used to investigate whether five job dimensions were associated with overall job satisfaction and intention to remain at the current hotel. Impact of satisfaction with workforce diversity on overall job satisfaction and intention to remain at the current hotel were also investigated using simple regression analysis. MANOVA was performed to determine the differences in satisfaction with five job satisfaction dimensions, overall job satisfaction, and intention to remain at the current hotel according to respondents' characteristics. Multivariate analysis of variance was also performed to investigate the differences in satisfaction with workforce diversity at the current hotel according to respondents' characteristics. A paired sample T-test was used to identify differences between satisfaction with job-related items and perception of importance of those job-related attributes.; Findings and conclusions. One significant finding in this study was that variables that differentiated overall job satisfaction and intention to remain at the current hotel were not the same. Differences existed in this relationship according to individual characteristics. The results of this study suggested that the relationship between job satisfaction and personal characteristics is mediated through the level of satisfaction with work environments. Factors that were considered important did not always influence overall job satisfaction nor intention to remain at the current hotel. Hotel operators may need to acknowledge that providing factors that workers consider important is not linked directly to overall job satisfaction and retention.