Strategies of handling employee grievance and their impact on job satisfaction evidence from selected hotels in Ghana

Abstract

This study aims to fill the gap to find out the causes of grievances and effect of handling grievances strategies including open door policy and confidence enjoyment on job satisfaction. The study employed a cross-sectional research design with a quantitative approach to analysing data. A survey questionnaire was the instrument used to collect data from the selected employees. The population for this study was made up of employee in selected hospitality industry in Ghana. However, the accessible population was employees in the Central Region of Ghana. The purposive sampling technique was used to select three hundred and forty-four (344) participants for the study. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was employed for linear regression analysis to answer the research questions. The findings from the quantitative data analysis revealed that low wages and salary paid, unattainable and impossible set target, poor working conditions, lack of protective gadgets for preventing workplace accidents and poor working relationships among employees are the causes of employee grievance at the selected hotels in the Central Region, Ghana. Among the handling grievance strategies, integrating and confidence enjoyment have no influence on job satisfaction among employees in the hospitality industries. Handling grievance strategies such as dominating, integrating, obliging, avoiding, and compromising influence job satisfaction. Obliging strategy is the most important strategy to deal with employee grievance in the hospitality industry in Ghana. Therefore, stakeholders in hospitality industries should improve work environment by way of giving employees space and privacy to do their work, making the office more comfortable, and improving communication. Furthermore, they should keep the employee productivity and morale high and further increase the pay of employees. To further foster a positive work environment, the industry should practice open communication to encourage an unhindered flow of ideas among employees and management with no fear of tough criticism. Second, handling grievance strategies such as dominating, integrating, obliging, avoiding, and compromising influence job satisfaction. From these findings, it is significant to indicate that the several handling strategies are paired and no single selection is best. More so, employees and managers should have the ability to master the various handling strategies when managing grievance as a key skill to be developed to satisfy employee job satisfaction. The employees or the supervisors should be able to identify and apply the optimal mix of strategies in conformity with the situation being handled.