Abstract

Corporate social responsibility is one of the most important concepts of our times. More and more companies recognise their responsibility towards their stakeholders, and the implementation of CSR has been proved to have several advantages. One of its benefits is the positive impact on job satisfaction. Studies on the topic have shown that this positive effect works in practice, in various sectors including tourism, but little information is available on the Hungarian hotel sector. Therefore, the aim of this research was to find out how CSR affects job satisfaction and how job satisfaction affects employee retention in Hungarian hotels. The research was conducted from April to June 2015 with 189 employees from front office, reservation and sales departments of Hungarian hotels filling out a questionnaire. The first part of the questionnaire measured the employees’ perceptions of the hotel’s CSR activities; the second part measured the job satisfaction and the intention of the respondents to remain the employee of the hotel. After reducing the large number of CSR and job satisfaction indicators used in the questionnaire, regression analysis was carried out to reveal the connection between CSR factors and job satisfaction factors and the connection between job satisfaction factors and employee retention. Based on the responses, CSR activities of Hungarian hotels could be categorised into four groups, namely, employee-centred CSR, consumer-centred CSR, social and environmental CSR and legal CSR. Analysis of the data showed that employee-centred CSR has the biggest positive impact on job satisfaction by affecting all of its aspects. However, the other three types also have a significant positive impact on certain elements of job satisfaction. The data also proved that employees with a higher level of job satisfaction are more likely to remain the employee of the hotel. As a conclusion, the results confirmed that CSR has significant positive impact on the job satisfaction of Hungarian hotel employees and indirectly, CSR activities can help retain employees. The findings show that CSR is worth to be dealt with seriously. Whether started in-house by introducing measures in favour of the employees or putting the emphasis on external issues, CSR is clearly beneficial for hotels in terms of employee retention.