Compensation, Work Discipline, and Employee Loyalty: Evidence from an Indonesian Food and Beverage SME

Abstract

This study examines whether compensation and work discipline are associated with employee work loyalty within a small-to-medium-sized enterprise (SME) in Indonesia's food and beverage (F&B) sector. A quantitative cross-sectional survey was administered to all 50 employees of Tsamara Resto, Bekasi, using a saturated sampling (census) design. Data were collected through structured Bahasa Indonesia Likert-scale questionnaires and analyzed using simple and multiple linear regression in IBM SPSS 25. The results indicate that compensation and work discipline are each positively and significantly associated with employee work loyalty, and that the joint model explains 23.0% of adjusted loyalty variance, with work discipline showing a slightly stronger standardized contribution. Rather than claiming broad causal generalization, this study provides contextual empirical evidence consistent with social exchange theory in an Indonesian F&B SME setting. For practitioners, the findings suggest that equitable compensation arrangements and procedurally fair disciplinary governance should be managed in an integrated manner to support employee loyalty. Because the study uses a single-organization cross-sectional design, the findings should be interpreted cautiously and verified through multi-site, longitudinal, or mixed-methods research.