Employee well-being profiles and service quality: a unit-level analysis using a multilevel latent profile approach

This study is designed to contribute to a better theoretical and empirical understanding of the unit-level relationship between employee well-being (job satisfaction and burnout, in the form of emotional exhaustion and cynicism) and service quality in two main ways. First is by adopting a person-oriented approach to identify distinct well-being profiles as a way of capturing the conjoint effect of satisfaction and burnout on service quality. And second is by employing an adapted form of multilevel latent profile analysis (MLPA) to examine the extent to which the distribution of employee well-being profiles in a work group affects the level of service quality provided by the group, as perceived by customers. These issues were examined using combined employee-customer data based on a sample of 396 employees and 1233 customers from 91 restaurant and reception work units of 42 hotels in Spain. In line with theoretical expectations and consistent with a strong win-win model of the unit level relationship between employee well-being and service quality, the results showed that work groups with a more positive distribution of well-being profiles, that is, with a greater proportion of employees with high levels of job satisfaction combined with low levels of burnout (emotional exhaustion and cynicism), significantly outperformed work groups with a less favourable internal distribution of well-being profiles. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.