Employees’ Satisfaction Is It an Antecedent of Customers’ Satisfaction: An Empirical Study on the Five and Four Star Hotels in the Kingdom of Bahrain

Abstract

Along eras, customers were considered the single reason for hotel properties to remain in business, and due to the fact that their satisfaction remained to be a crucial issue, both practitioners and academics address it with a special concern. Because customers can easily perceive the enthusiasm and the positive energy of those employees in terms of their willingness to provide them with an enjoyable memorable experience, the founder of Marriott hotel chain stated “You can’t make happy guests with unhappy employees”. Therefore this study aims to investigate whether employees’ satisfaction can be viewed as an antecedent of customers’ satisfaction. An empirical study was conducted on the hotel industry in the Kingdom of Bahrain to investigate the relationship between employee and customer satisfaction as the impact of such relation in the hospitality industry is not quiet evidenced yet. The research adopts the analytical descriptive approach, utilizing two questionnaires addressed towards employees and customers to identify the impact of employees’ satisfaction on customers’ satisfaction. Data for this study was collected from employees and customers of five and four star hotels. The study traced the impact of employees’ satisfaction on customers’ satisfaction and results revealed high correlation between these variables. Empirical findings confirmed that pay and award as well as promotion have significant effect on customers’ satisfaction. Drawing from this finding, the research suggests for hotel practitioners to create employee engagement’s score and to correlate it to customer satisfaction score in one chart to manage this relationship.

Keywords: Employees’ satisfaction, pay and award, supervision, working conditions, promotion, customers’ satisfaction, five and four star hotels.