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.