Correlates of Nonwork and Work Satisfaction Among Hotel Employees: Implications for Managers

Abstract

This study develops and tests a research model that investigates job satisfaction as a mediator of the effects of interrole conflicts, work environment, and affectivity on career satisfaction and life satisfaction. Based on data gathered from a sample of frontline hotel employees in Turkey, these relationships were assessed through structural equation modeling. Results reveal that while interrole conflicts and work overload do not have significant impacts on any of the satisfaction constructs, perceptions of organizational politics show significant negative influences on career and life satisfaction, mediated by job satisfaction. Job satisfaction also acts as a mediator of the effects of the positive elements of work environment (perceived organizational support, job autonomy, and participation in decision-making) on career and life satisfaction. While negative affectivity shows no significant influence on satisfaction constructs, positive affectivity significantly influences career satisfaction and life satisfaction directly and indirectly through the mediating role of job satisfaction.

Keywords:

• affectivity
• career satisfaction
• interrole conflict
• job satisfaction
• life satisfaction
• work environment

Notes

1. Details of the exploratory factor analysis results are available from the authors.

2. Prior to confirmatory factor analysis, we examined the distributions of scale items and found that many items had skewed distributions. This is not unexpected especially for scales like job satisfaction. The partial aggregation approach provided some remedy and led to distributions that resemble more closely to a bell-shaped distribution.

3. Our focus was on the relationships among constructs as hypothesized in Figure 1. However, we also explored potential differences on the magnitudes of the study constructs across the three types of hotels. A multivariate analysis variance (MANOVA) indicated that respondents from four-star hotels reported significantly higher levels of job autonomy and work overload relative to those in three- or five-star hotels. The results also showed that respondents from five-star hotels perceived significantly higher levels of organizational support compared to respondents from other types of hotels. There were no other significant differences.

4. While we did not have formal hypotheses, we explored the possibility of gender, marital status, and type of hotel playing a moderator role (buffering or enhancing the relationships) in the research model. We conducted tests of equality of variance-covariance matrices of all study variables between males and females, married and single employees, and among three-, four-, and five-star hotels. The variance-covariance matrices were not significantly different across gender, marital status, or type of hotel. These results suggest that gender, marital status, and hotel type do not buffer or enhance the relationships hypothesized in the research model (Joreskog & Sorbom, 1996). Similarly, we also explored the possibility of moderator roles of both positive (PA) and negative affectivity (NA). None of the interaction variables (computed as products PA and NA with other predictor variables after centering all independent variables in the model) showed significant effects.