Recognize and thrive: predicting employees’ satisfaction towards fairness in reward and recognition system using explainable machine learning and text mining

Abstract

Purpose

In current era, retaining the best-performing employees has become essential for businesses to compete in the dynamic technological landscape. Consequently, organizations must ensure that their star performers believe that company’s reward and recognition (R&R) system is fair and equal. This study aims to use an explainable machine learning (eXML) model to develop a prediction algorithm for employee satisfaction with the fairness of R&R systems.

Design/methodology/approach

The current study uses state-of-the-art machine learning models such as Naive Bayes, Decision Tree C5.0, Random Forest and support vector machine-RBF to predict employee satisfaction towards fairness in R&R. The primary data used in the study has been collected from the employees of a large public sector undertaking from an emerging economy. This study also proposes a novel improved Naïve Bayes (INB) algorithm, the efficiency of which is compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Findings

It is seen that the proposed INB model outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in many scenarios. Further, the proposed model and feature interaction are explained using the explainable machine learning (XML) concept. In addition, this study incorporates text mining techniques to corroborate the results from XML and suggests that “Transparency”, “Recognition”, “Unbiasedness”, “Appreciation” and “Timeliness in reward” are the most important features that impact employee satisfaction.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to use INB algorithm and mixed method research (text mining along with machine learning algorithms) for the prediction of employee satisfaction with respect to the R&R system.

Citation

Trivedi, S.K., Srivastava, J., Patra, P., Singh, S. and Jena, D. (2024), "Recognize and thrive: predicting employees’ satisfaction towards fairness in reward and recognition system using explainable machine learning and text mining", Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/GKMC-11-2023-0416