The interplay between internal communication, employee engagement, job satisfaction, and employee loyalty in higher education institutions in Vietnam

Abstract

The present study examines the roles of internal communication (IC), job engagement (JE), organisation engagement (OE) and job satisfaction (JS) in producing employee loyalty (EL) based on the social exchange theory. This study employed an online questionnaire-based survey design to collect data from 255 respondents from higher education institutions (HEIs) in Binh Duong province using convenience and snowball sampling techniques. Data analyses and hypothesis testing were carried out using the partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The findings show that all relationships are significantly validated, except for the JE-JS relationship. Our work is the first to investigate employee loyalty in the HEI context of an emerging economy such as Vietnam by incorporating internal communication, employee engagement (including job and organisation engagement) and job satisfaction to develop and validate a research model for the study. This study is expected to contribute to the theory and advance our understanding of different mechanisms that job engagement, organisation engagement and job satisfaction can play in the relationship between internal communication and employee loyalty.