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.