Hotel online employee experiences and employee satisfaction and recommendation: an evolutionary stimulus-organism-response perspective

Purpose Online employee reviews increasingly influence employer reputation and recruitment. Although equity theory suggests that employees evaluate their employment relationship through perceptions of fairness, existing research has largely examined distributive, procedural and interactional fairness as independent predictors of employee outcomes. Consequently, little is known about how these fairness dimensions jointly shape employee satisfaction and recommendation in online review contexts. Drawing on equity theory and the evolutionary SOR framework, this study aims to examine how different configurations of fairness perceptions generate employee satisfaction and recommendation and whether the two outcomes emerge through similar or distinct pathways. Design/methodology/approach Using 14,475 Glassdoor employee reviews from the hotel sector, latent Dirichlet allocation identifies job-related experience themes and maps them to distributive, procedural and interactional fairness. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis identifies configurations leading to satisfaction and recommendation. Findings Employee satisfaction arises from multiple fairness configurations rather than any single job attribute. Four orientations emerge. Pragmatism and utilitarianism emphasize tangible returns, idealism reflects institutional expectations and perfectionism requires comprehensive fairness across dimensions. Recommendation does not directly follow satisfaction. Although satisfaction functions as a core condition, employees recommend their organization only when certain fairness dimensions compensate for others. This indicates a configurational evaluation process rather than a simple linear response. Originality/value This study shows that online employee reviews represent public evaluative decisions rather than simple reflections of internal attitudes. It refines equity theory by revealing complementary and substitutive relationships among fairness dimensions and identifies a boundary condition of the SOR framework in which behavioral endorsement is not solely mediated by satisfaction. Practically, improving a single job attribute is insufficient because balanced fairness perceptions are necessary to encourage employee advocacy.