Relationship Between Employee Satisfaction And Service Quality: A Survey Of Funeral Homes In Nairobi City County
Abstract
Funeral homes in Kenya like other businesses operate in a competitive environment.
Knowing what factors influence the level of service quality in their institutions is
important because it can lead to future business success for the funeral homes. One of the
dimensions that influence service quality is employee satisfaction. Therefore the
relationship between employees‟ level of job satisfaction and service quality is important
because if it is understood properly it can enable the right decisions to be made about
service quality that lead to increase in customer satisfaction. The study objective was to
establish the relationship between employee satisfaction and service quality of the
Funeral homes in Nairobi. The study adopted a descriptive research design where each of
the 7 funeral homes in Nairobi formed the sample frame. A questionnaire was the main
research instrument in which one questionnaire was dropped and latter collected from the
firms. The managers answered questionnaire items constructed by the researcher. The
inferential relationship was imputed using the ordered regression analysis. The study
findings were that in cognizance of the role that its staff play in enhancing the level of
service quality, the funeral homes have put in place measures aimed at motivating the
staff. The study found that indeed the level of employee‟s satisfaction influenced
positively the level of service quality in the funeral homes. Thus an institution will have
to identify the most critical variables that affect its employee‟s performance and try to
reinforce the same in order to improve the effectiveness of service quality. This implies
that the senior management of the firm should consider their internal reward system as
well as working environment for their employees because they were found to affect their
performance and therefore job satisfaction. The managers should consider their internal
strategic management processes, training and development process so that these practices
can motivate their staff and this will increase their satisfaction and as the study show it
will increase the service quality. The major weakness in this study is that it was limited in
scope in the sense that it was only based on funeral homes in Nairobi. This means that the
findings cannot be over generalized. Future researchers may concentrate on trying to
identify the other factors that influence the service quality in the funeral homes other than
the employee level of satisfaction.
Publisher
University of Nairobi