The Influence of Perceived Employer Coolness on Job Satisfaction

"It has recently become more difficult for companies to attract and retain talent, especially for the tourism and hospitality sector. To attract employees, firms are designing cool and fun workplaces. Our research approaches the ideas behind this practice by testing the relationship between perceived employer coolness and job satisfaction. We propose that employer coolness drives job satisfaction because it allows employees to satisfy the basic psychological needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, and makes them proud of their company.

Employing the instrumental-symbolic framework (Hoye and Sacks, 2011) as well as social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 2004) as theoretical foundations we conducted two studies.

In Study 1, we collected data on brand coolness on 40 known global brands, and correlated this data with Glassdoor ratings of these brands. Glassdoor is a platform where employees can review their employers. The results show that correlations with the composite coolness scale are high and significant, ranging from 0.425 (p<0.001) between coolness and satisfaction with senior management to 0.461 (p<0.001) between coolness and satisfaction with compensation and benefits.

In Study 2, we proposed a SEM model in which perceived coolness influences job satisfaction through parallel meditation. For this study, the data was collected from respondents. The mediators are the satisfaction of basic psychological needs (competence, autonomy and relatedness) and pride. The model fits the data reasonably 91 well (?2/ df = 3.307; CFI = 0.917; TLI = 0907.; RMSEA = 0.081; SRMR = 0.0754) and the results demonstrate that employer coolness relates significantly to the dependent variables.

We contribute to the coolness and job attitudes literature, suggesting that employees are more satisfied at cool workplaces. In tourism and hospitality, coolness is an important factor (Kock 2021) from a tourist’s perspective. Yet, it is also a key resource for such stakeholders to attract and retain employees.