Relationship between Leader Member Exchange, turnover intention and job satisfaction among hospitality employees in London

As it has emerged from the literature, high rates of job satisfaction are related with many organizational outputs, like OCB, commitment and turnover intention. This is particularly significant in hospitality, where those outputs are functional to the delivery of a better customer service. However, hard working conditions, diffused negative managerial practices (Poulston, 2008) and a progressive reduction of motivation over time (Øgaard et al., 2008) contribute to reduce job satisfaction among employees.

Antecedents and consequences of job satisfaction in hospitality were the object of investigation of a study carried out by Yang (2010) in Taiwan. Among antecedents, the researcher found a strong negative correlation between burnout and job satisfaction and strong positive correlation between socialization and satisfaction. Contrary to the expectations, two stressors like role conflicts and role ambiguity correlated positively with job satisfaction. This was explained as a consequence of culture and characteristics of sample units, but the author specified that stress can generate severe dysfunctional effects on employees’ performance and therefore management must adopt policies towards a stress reduction (Yang, 2010).

Liu and Yang (2009) carried out a research among 250 employees of hospitality structures in China. At the first step, the two scholars had considered 20 factors affecting job satisfaction, which were reduced to 4 main ones after a factor analysis: salary and organizational structure, management, work environment and interpersonal relationship. As a result, it has been observed that salary and organizational structure, management and interpersonal relationship were correlated with job satisfaction (explaining 58,2 % of the regression equation), while work environment was not significant (Liu and yang, 2009).

Finally, Øgaard et al. found that managers’ style has influence on employees’ job satisfaction. Moving from considerations about the challenging role executed by managers, who are required to achieve cost efficiency (through control and standard procedures) and good customer service (obtainable increasing employees’ empowerment and autonomy), they observed that employees feel satisfy when they perceive a balance between control and autonomy (Øgaard et al., 2008). This seems to imply that a good leadership style in hospitality should be found beyond the dichotomy between transactional and transformational approaches.