Assessing employers’ satisfaction with Indian engineering graduates using expectancy-disconfirmation theory

Purpose - Casting employers as customers, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the association between expectations, perceptions and disconfirmation beliefs with the satisfaction of employers regarding the competencies possessed by fresh engineering graduates hired by such employers in the Indian context. Design/methodology/approach - Using data collected from 284 employers, the authors have hypothesized and examined a partial mediation model in which disconfirmation beliefs mediate the relationships between expectations and perceptions, and employer satisfaction. Furthermore, the authors have tested if this mediated relationship is moderated by the age and sex of respondents representing employers. Findings - Results indicate that employers’ satisfaction can be explained from the framework of the expectancy-disconfirmation theory. Employers’ expectations and perceptions are established to be associated with employers’ satisfaction with new hires, and positive disconfirmation mediates these relationships. Results also indicate that age moderates the effect of predictor variables employers’ expectations and employers’ perception on the mediator disconfirmation. Sex, however, did not moderate any relationship. Practical implications - The results demonstrate the usefulness of the expectancy-disconfirmation theory for studying employer satisfaction with competencies of recent engineering graduates in India. Findings are relevant to multiple stakeholders including employers hiring engineering graduates, engineers and technical institutions. Originality/value - Expectancy-disconfirmation theory has been successfully applied to measure customer satisfaction in consumer behaviour research, while satisfaction of employers has been studied in the field of organizational behaviour. The paper stands out in the literature as one of its major implications is to extend the expectancy-disconfirmation theory to predict employers’ satisfaction.