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1. Introduction
In the hospitality industry, employee satisfaction is crucial for successful businesses (Akgunduz et al., 2022). Satisfied employees can deal with difficulties and solve problems effectively (Zhao and Ghiselli, 2016). As satisfied employees make satisfied customers (Ma and Qu, 2011), they contribute to long-term relationships between the organization and its customers (Akgunduz et al., 2022). Thus, promoting employee satisfaction is a critical management technique for retaining and developing human capital. However, managers and academicians continue to grapple with how to satisfy an employee because employee satisfaction largely depends on conditions and interactions in the work environment (Melie et al., 2020). Beyond this, gaining insight into how organizational efforts enhance employee satisfaction can help ensure a long-term person–organization relationship and the sustainable human capital for organization effectiveness.
Internal marketing is a critical corporate initiative that considers employees the first “customers,” whose needs and wants companies seek to satisfy (Hernández-Díaz et al., 2017). While human resources practices focus on staffing, internal marketing tailors marketing strategies to different segments of internal customers, aiming to change their attitude, intention and behavior as a means of achieving the organization’s goals (Tang et al., 2017). By focusing on employee satisfaction, internal marketing schemes inspire and encourage employees to deliver exceptional services to customers (Huang, 2020). Tang et al. (2020) showed that work-related resources and experience can influence employees’ state of mind, thereby highlighting the spillover effects of internal marketing on their happiness. However, to the best of our knowledge, no research extends the investigation of whether internal marketing could contribute to a higher level and more stable state, namely, life satisfaction. Erdogan et al. (2012) explained life satisfaction as a function of need satisfaction. Thus, individuals have a variety of needs that, if fulfilled, could result in life satisfaction (Greguras and Diefendorff, 2010). Moreover, Golob and Podnar (2021) opined that a spillover of job satisfaction to life satisfaction is the effect that reflects a truly human life, in terms of work–life unification (Duffy et al., 2016). Nevertheless, the mechanism by which the effects of internal marketing spill over from the work domain to the life domain requires more empirical evidence.
Person-organization fit has been established as a mediator between perceptions of human resource practices...