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.