Is someone listening to me? A topic modeling approach using guided LDA for exploring hospitality value proposition through online employee reviews

Abstract

This study extends research on hospitality employee recruitment and retention by examining what employees are communicating through their online reviews. Centering on the Employee Value Propositions (EVPs) as a theoretical framework, the current study proposes that this industry presents distinct propositions that are valuable to employees but remain underexplored by earlier studies that tend to focus on presumptive knowledge. Using topic modeling techniques, including Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Guided LDA, the authors analyzed 19,488 unstructured employee reviews from Glassdoor.com. The findings confirmed that interactions with colleagues and other individuals in the workplace play a significant role in shaping employees' satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their hospitality jobs. In addition, the findings reveal that the diverse set of benefits, such as complementary travel and hospitality products, can become important economic values in hospitality positions, sometimes overcoming the weakness of low pay in salary. Altogether, the research illuminates how EVP can be understood by hospitality researchers and ultimately implemented by practitioners.