Employee well-being profiles and service quality: a unit-level analysis using a multilevel latent profile approach

ABSTRACT

This study is designed to contribute to a better theoretical and empirical understanding of the unit-level relationship between employee well-being (job satisfaction and burnout, in the form of emotional exhaustion and cynicism) and service quality in two ways. First is by adopting a person-oriented approach to identify distinct well-being profiles as a way of capturing the conjoint effect of satisfaction and burnout on service quality. Second is by employing an adapted form of multilevel latent profile analysis (MLPA) to examine the extent to which the distribution of employee well-being profiles in a work group affects the level of service quality provided by the group. These issues were examined using combined employee-customer data based on a sample of 396 employees and 1233 customers from 91 restaurant and reception units in 42 hotels in Spain. In line with theoretical expectations and consistent with a win-win model of the unit level relationship between employee well-being and service quality, the results showed that work groups with a greater proportion of employees with high levels of job satisfaction combined with low levels of burnout (emotional exhaustion and cynicism), significantly outperformed work groups with a less favourable internal distribution of well-being profiles. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Well-being profiles
• multilevel
• service quality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

Present affiliation for Miriam Benitez is: Department of Social Psychology, University of Seville, Seville, Spain.This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO/FEDER). [PSI2015-6+4894-P].