Abstract
Reputation is a crucial asset for service organizations, in particular when actual service quality is hard to assess, e.g. in the context of hospitals. Employees and their recommendation intentions to other professionals and potential patients are crucial in the reputation building process. Against this background, we test with a quantitative-exploratory approach, for 1,022 employees in two German hospitals, how eleven dimensions of employees’ job satisfaction explain their recommendation intention on behalf of the hospital they work. Moreover, we explore this for different employee groups. Our results show that there are different employee job satisfaction dimensions explaining recommendation intention for different employee groups such as nurses, doctors, or employees in the administrative field. We frame our findings against the broad but scattered management literature that is relevant for job satisfaction and organizational reputation, and discuss implications for practice and further research.
1. Introduction
An organizations’ reputation is an important factor in creating valuable stakeholder relationships and gaining public trust (Helm, 2011). This is particularly true for service providers, as the intangibility of their offerings makes the assessment of their quality vague and incomplete (Su, Swanson, Chinchanachokchai, Hsu, & Chen, 2016; Wang, Lo, & Hui, 2003). A strong and favourable reputation reduces, ab initio, consumers’ risk of choosing an incompetent or incapable service provider. Consequently, a solid reputation is essential for the survival of any service provider.
While there is extant research on how customers influence an organization’s reputation, research to explore the crucial role other stakeholders – especially employees – play in reputation management has begun (Helm, 2011; Lages, 2012; Shamma & Hassan, 2009). Because employees act as service providers and communicate about their employer, they become advocates for the organization’s reputation (Helm, 2011). Following the rationale of stakeholder theory and resource dependence theory, employees control a vital organizational resource – the organization’s reputation – by their intention to recommend an organization to potential employees and clients. Literature provides evidence that this behaviour is related to employee job satisfaction (Lages, 2012). However, there has been no research, as yet that examines the relationship between employee job satisfaction in service organizations and its relatedness with employees’ recommendation intentions. Hence, our study focusses on employees’ job satisfaction and its relationship with their recommendation intention as an active act of reputation building by employees.
