To Stay or not to Stay – Voice of Hotel Employees from Glassdoor

Employee turnover has been a major challenge for the hotel industry, and researchers and actioners have made continued efforts to investigate the major causes of turnover. Existing studies mostly relied on employees’ self-reported data which is not free of social desirability bias and examined turnover intention instead of turnover. Using employees’ shared comments on their current and past employers on Glassdoor, this identified the main factors of hotel employees’ turnover based on word-frequency analysis and a systematic coding process. The study further categorized these factors into hygiene factors and motivators and assessed their influence on employees’ turnover decisions using sentiment analysis and regressions. The study contributes to Hertzberg’s Two-factor Theory by providing an alternative way of operationalizing the theory. It focused on actual turnover decisions rather than turnover intentions. It also has important methodological implications by using employee-generated comments on social media.