Through the looking glass: Extending the “satisfaction mirror” in thirty-nine countries

Abstract

This article examines the “satisfaction mirror” hypothesis of a link between employee job satisfaction and client satisfaction, which has been studied in the business literature but remains relatively unexplored in public management. Using data from an international education survey covering 39 countries in 2015 and 2019, our empirical results show strong support for the satisfaction mirror in the pooled analysis. For all 39 countries, the end outcome (parent satisfaction) is always positively correlated with student satisfaction, and it is correlated with teacher satisfaction and test scores in a large majority of the countries. Across years, there is significantly more fluctuation in model fit, suggesting that within-country events play an important role in the applicability of the satisfaction mirror model. The article concludes with a discussion of theoretical and policy implications of national and organizational factors of the satisfaction mirror effect in different national contexts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We will use the term “client” rather than customer, citizen, user or stakeholder in this study to focus specifically on the individuals who use the service. This is somewhat distinct from Petrovsky, Xin, and Yu (2023) who include citizens who may or may not have direct interactions with the specific public employees being studied.

2 Specific measures of service quality and meeting expectations in these studies are similar and include concepts like reliability, courtesy, responsiveness, empathy, and flexibility.

3 The list of countries included in our sample for one or more years is: Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Chile, Chinese Taipei, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Kuwait, Lithuania, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

4 TIMSS provides its own reliability coefficients based on their research; ours are determined from the data that are actually used in this study and can differ slightly from their official reports.

5 A reasonable hypothesis is that the satisfaction mirror is more likely to hold in policy areas where there is general support for the policy area thus allowing positive feedback among employees and clients. Policy areas that place constraints on individuals should be more likely to generate client resistance and create situations that will then more likely lead to job dissatisfaction.

6 We also replicate our findings on Model 3 in Table 2 employing (1) regression models with school fixed effects and clustered standard errors by country and (2) random constant multilevel models (two-levels), and the results remain largely consistent (see Table A2 in the Appendix A).

7 This modeling effort will not include full mediation analysis of the indirect relationship between teacher satisfaction and parent satisfaction, that is, the relationship that goes through teacher satisfaction improving test score performance. However, an estimate of this effect is included in Appendix Table A4.

8 At the present time reliable cross-national measures of these concepts do not exist in the literature; they would need to be created by examining the education system or systems in each country. This would require examination of documents in the individual countries since such measures are not available in any existing education databases.

9 Other factors that might serve as macro contextual variables would be culture (Hofstede 1984), differential changes in job quality (Amin 1994), socio-political and economic context (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2002; Taylor and Westover 2011), administrative structure (centralized vs. decentralized) (Hutchcroft 2001), and job mobility (An and Meier 2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kenneth J. Meier

Kenneth J. Meier ([email protected]) is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the School of Public Affairs and Director of the Summer Diversity Academy at American University, a Professor of Public Management at the Cardiff School of Business, Cardiff University (Wales), and Professor of Bureaucracy and Democracy at Leiden University (the Netherlands). His research interests include public management, the role of bureaucracy in democratic systems, comparative public administration, behavioral approaches to public administration, and virtually everything else.

William G. Prince

William G. Prince ([email protected]) is a doctoral candidate at the School of Public Affairs, American University School of Public Affairs. His research interests include public personnel management, organization theory, and public performance.

Seung-Ho An

Seung-Ho An ([email protected]) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. His research interests include public and nonprofit management, bureaucratic politics, organizational behavior, equity in public policy, and research methods.