Employee Satisfaction vs. Service Performance: A Chinese hotel’s perspective

Abstract

Among business practitioners, it is a conventional wisdom that employees’ satisfaction determines their service performance. However, in the academic world, there is a continuous debate on whether service employees’ attitudes can be directly associated with their job performance. Culture might influence people on their behavior. With the interest of examining the relationship between job satisfaction and performance, the limited studies on employees in China has further concentrated the research on Chinese hotel employees with objectives of capturing the culture trend and identifying the constructs of contemporary Chinese hospitality employees' job satisfaction. An international hotel chain in China – Days Inn China was chosen as a company to be focused upon with a sample group – employees of three selected Days’ hotels for questionnaire survey. Findings indicated that some dimensions of culture changed over time. Job content, sense of security, feeling of achievement seemed to be the most important indicators for Chinese employees’ overall job satisfaction. Although there was no strong correlation found between employee's job satisfaction and service performance in this study, the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment was observed.