Hearing employee voice and handling grievance: Views from frontline hotel and travel agency employees

This study aims to explore the association between employees’ voice and grievance handling, and how this relationship influences job satisfaction as a condition for decreasing leave intention. A representative sample of frontline hotel and travel agency employees in Egypt is surveyed and, in total, 662 observations were analysed by structural equation modeling. It is determined that employee voice influences the grievance handling styles adopted. In turn, it is also found that job satisfaction boosts and mediates the relationship between grievance handling and leave intention. Importantly, obliging and compromising are key grievance handling styles for enhancing job satisfaction. In contrast, a dominating approach and avoidance were found to reduce job satisfaction. Furthermore, the results show significant disparities between travel agencies and hotels in the correlations examined. Overall, the findings cohere with extant views that the higher the job satisfaction the lower employees’ leave intention