Exploring factors affecting employee loyalty through the relationship between service quality and management commitment : a case study analysis in the iron and steel industry Al Ezz Dekheila Steel Company in Egypt

The purpose of this study is to discover factors affecting employee loyalty through the relationship between service quality and management commitment from the employees' perspective on the iron and steel industry, specifically in Al Ezz Dekheila Steel Company (EZDK) (a Middle East steel producer with a global reach) in Egypt. The author employed an inductive qualitative research approach through semi-structured interviews with 15 employees from different managerial levels (top, middle, and divisional) to achieve the study aim. All interviews were conducted in Arabic, the mother tongue of all respondents. Data were gathered personally by the researcher and statistically analyzed using thematic analysis to determine the main ideas of the transcripts. Based on the analysis of the interviews, the study has identified main themes, which refer to the important factors identified by employees of EZDK. Through these themes, the conceptual framework of factors affecting employee loyalty is developed. Five main themes are presented, where each theme consists of many codes. Themes and codes could be represented as follows; theme of Corporate Social Responsibility (Environmental Impact, Helping the Government, CSR Projects, and Reducing Energy Consumption), theme of Quality of Service Offered to Employees (Safety Climate, Service Recovery Performance, and Policies), theme of Working Atmosphere (Friendly, Supportive, Teamwork, Fair environment, and obstacles of CRM), theme of Management Commitment (Management support, Supervisor Support, and Transparency) and theme of Employee Loyalty (Employees Empowerment, Employees Satisfaction, Employees planning, and being a part of the company). This paper contributes by filling the gap in the business field in both marketing (service quality, internal marketing) and management (HR, CSR) in discovering the factors affecting employee loyalty from the employees' frame of reference, as it is considered as the first of its sort to develop a conceptual framework that explores the factors affecting employee loyalty in the iron and steel industry in the setting of one of the leading developing nations in Africa and the Middle East.