Job Satisfaction

Employee job satisfaction involves a complex set of personal and situational variables. Equipped with an understanding of the personality traits, interests, abilities, skills, and values of employees, managers can design jobs and practices that enhance performance and maximize job satisfaction.

1. Job Satisfaction

While the common-sense belief “satisfied employees are more productive than dissatisfied employees” has not been supported by research findings, what has been established is some link between job performance and job satisfaction..

Job satisfaction refers to a positive attitude towards our work. Job satisfaction depends on both internal and external factors such as:

· Mentally challenging work: Whether the work and its regular tasks are intrinsically motivating. We enjoy jobs that help us use and develop our skills and abilities. Some task variety and control over how to do tasks is usually important.

· Expectations: Our expectations for growth, advancement, promotion, increased competence, and recognition – and whether those are met or likely to be met.

· Fair compensation: Our pay, compensation, benefits are clear and equitable in comparison to other people in similar jobs.

· The work environment: Organizational policies, practices, procedures as well as physical safety and aesthetics.

· Relationships: Whether the people we work with like, respect, and support us. The quality of our relationships with colleagues, peers, subordinates and managers – whether we like, respect, trust and want to be with and like them.

· Job-Personality Fit: A good fit between our personality and our job. Our genetic predisposition to enjoy our work.

2. Employee Responses to Job Dissatisfaction

If we are dissatisfied with a job, many people assume we would just quit. In many ways this is based on Theory X motivation assumptions – that people do not like work or responsibility. The reason the common sense notion that satisfaction does not cause productivity does not hold is because working, for many, is actually an activity that gives meaning to life. People want to work and produce. Their experience is often that they are not able to do so in the organizations we have created.

So the research finds that many of us do not quit when we are unhappy with a job. Leaving the job is just one of four options. Many people express their dissatisfaction with their jobs through active and constructive attempts to improve conditions at work. For example, members of unions who are dissatisfied with their jobs may voice their dissatisfaction through grievance procedures or through formal contract negotiations. A third response some others choose is to stay loyal to the organization but in a passive way, waiting for conditions to improve. And fourth, we have those people who ‘quit and stay’ – they are passive about their dissatisfaction and allow conditions to worsen while they watch. The last response helps us to understand situations where job satisfaction is low but employee turnover is also low.

Job satisfaction occurs when we do work we love, in a place we enjoy, with people with respect – all with financial comfort.

· The substance of the work excites our interests-passions and creates alignment with the organizational purpose,

· The work environment and life style we have enable us to live according to our values-life priorities.

organizations are coming up with creative ways to increase job satisfaction. At one organization in California, Autodesk, the employees job satisfaction increased when they could bring their dogs to work. The organization believes its high job satisfaction rating, loyal and motivated workforce, and low turnover rates are the result of these kinds of practices.

The challenge for many of us is in identifying the specifics of each of these factors that are important to us. Even if we find the perfect job and are satisfied in it, the likelihood that it will stay that way is slim. So we prioritize these job satisfaction factors and do our best. In the next few sections we will explore ways to identify and articulate our interests-passions, skills-talents-gifts, and values-priorities.

Interests are areas of work which attract us naturally. These are the endeavors to which we bring our greatest passion. The underlying patterns of work interest are enduring and become more so as we age. Motivating interests are the number one driver of job satisfaction over the lifetime.

Think of things you love to do. These can be anything from childhood to the present. Include things you like to do even if you cannot do them well. The only criterion for this list is that you enjoy doing it. Notice if there are any themes to the things you like to do. Did you notice that you tend to enjoy working with things? If so, perhaps you would be interested jobs in engineering, equipment operation, law enforcement-security, or some skilled craft. People who like manipulating data often enjoy work in accounting, finance, administration or records management. Outdoors oriented folks sometimes like jobs in agriculture, landscape services, animal care, athletics, recreation, or environmental resource management. Maybe you enjoy working with ideas in an analytical and would like jobs in the information-medical-social and hard sciences, or creative expressions through the visual-performing arts and communications. People who like people are often satisfied doing service or leadership jobs in beneficiary service, hospitality, education, counseling, ministry, healthcare, law, politics, management and sales. There are many ways to combine your motivating interests into themes.

5. Skills, Talents and Gifts

Skills, talents and gifts are those abilities we do well – usually due to a combination of innate talent, development, and constant positive reinforcement in our lifetimes. What is interesting to note is that skills alone are not the primary indicator of job satisfaction. Doing something you do well does not necessarily make you happy. Many of us have the experience of doing something well, perhaps because we were naturally talented or because someone we respected wanted us to do that skill, but we do not enjoy doing it. We are not intrinsically interested in that activity. As a result, we do it because we are rewarded with money, approval, and a sense of competence – and we remain somewhat discontent because it is not a core passion for us. Be sure to distinguish those skills you are using because you love using them, from those skills you are using because you are rewarded for doing them through money or approval.

Skills are less relevant than interests as a predictor of job satisfaction. However, both skills and interests together are a wonderful way to target the job most likely to satisfy you.

6. Interests Skills and Abilities Exercise

THIS EXERCISE IS MORE THAN ONE PAGE BUT IT WOULD TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS AS A WEB COURSE. THE SECTIONS THAT FOLLOW IN THE MAIN PART OF THE TEXT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN TO WORK WITHOUT THIS EXERCISE, BUT I HAVE TEXT THAT CAN INorganizational THE RESULTS OF THIS EXERCISE.

7. Designing Your Perfect Job

Your Core Work Skills and Interests are things you enjoy and you do them well. It is desirable to have the bulk of your job tasks fit into this area. If you are currently doing a job where most of the tasks are totally aligned with your core work skills and interests, congratulations. For those of you who are not doing jobs consistent with your core work skills and interests, perhaps you can seek projects or assignments in your organization that are a better fit for you. Sometimes we can redesign our jobs so that there is a better fit. And if the misalignment is too big to fix within our organizations or through leisure activities, we make seek employment elsewhere. If you do decide to look elsewhere be sure to use these skills and interests on your resume. Be prepared to provide examples of how you demonstrated your motivating skills in your past endeavors (even if it was through volunteer or leisure activities).

Your High Potential Activities are where you have high interest and low skill level at this time. Make time and space in your life to develop your skill level. Your interest provides the passion. Look for opportunities to develop and use these interests at work – by working with a mentor, or by volunteering your time for a project that will help you develop here. If you are asked in a performance review or interview “what areas do you need to develop?” respond with these high potential activities. Sometimes your organization will pay for you to develop these interests into work-relevant competencies.

The place of divine discontent is the area where we are skilled at an activity yet we do not enjoy using that skill – The Supporting Skills quadrant. If your job is actually in this quadrant, the best thing to do is to look for opportunities to mentor other people who want to develop these skills and delegate these tasks away.

In the final quadrant we find our energy drainers. Energy drainers are activities where you have neither interest nor ability. Most of us have at least a few job tasks that fall into this quadrant. Of course, you do not want the major part of your job to be these activities, not if you seek job satisfaction. However, this is a great opportunity to find partners who enjoy and are good at these activities. Many activities in organizations now require several people to do them well. This provides an opportunity to maximize skill and interest diversity. Your core work skills and interests may be energy drainers for someone else, and vice versa.

8. Values, Beliefs, and Life Priorities

The psychologist Rokeach defined values as beliefs that guide action and judgements across a variety of situations. The research Rokeach and others performed supports the view that differences in our values explain differences in our behavior. Values also affect our attitudes, perceptions, needs, motivation and satisfaction at work. Values are learned from our cultural setting, our parents, friends, family, peers, media, teachers and role models. They come from the explanations we tell about the meaning of events in our lives. Values tend to be deeply and organizationly held beliefs with emotional charge for us. We use them to justify our feelings. For many of us our values are just ‘true’ and ‘reality’. Values form the basis of our life priorities.

Types of Values

Researchers have organized values into different categories. Allport categorized values as theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political, and religious. Rokeach described terminal and instrumental values. Terminal values are values that reflect a person’s belief about ‘ends’ to be achieved. Terminal values include a comfortable life, a sense of accomplishment, equality, beauty, security, freedom, happiness, love, salvation, respect and wisdom. Instrumental values—beliefs about the best means for achieving desired ends—include being loving, open minded, cheerful, courageous, honest, helpful, independent, obedient or responsible. Implicit in these two categories is an ethical system about means justifying ends or not.

9. Values Clarification

Through values clarification we identify values most important to us – sometimes with a prompt from a list, sometimes through open-ended questions. It is common to distinguish espoused values – that is values you say are important but do not act upon – from behavior-guiding values. Values that meet the following criteria are usually seen to be behavior-guiding values.

3. You have chosen the value freely from alternatives, after considering the pros and cons of that value, and you understand the consequences of acting on that value. To choose the value freely you must have some awareness of what an alternative value would be. For many values absorbed from our culture and our parents, we are only able to identify alternative values by encountering people and situations who have decidedly different values from ours.

Feel free to make a list of your values and ask yourself if you meet the five criteria. Once you have the values that meet all five criteria, you may wish to prioritize the remaining values in order of importance to you. When looking for satisfying work, be sure to consider your values. Your values are what you must have, not what you should have, in order to have job satisfaction.

10. Job Enrichment Model

Hackman and Oldham developed a Job Characteristics Enrichment Model that managers and individuals can use to think about how to redesign jobs to increase job satisfaction.

INSERT HERE *** Diagram 3: Job characteristics enrichment model ***

There are individual difference in skills, interests, abilities and motivation. Step 1 in job enrichment is to identify those individual differences. Step 2 is to determine what the core job characteristics need to be for a good fit between the individual and their job. Step 3 is to make sure there is the right skill variety in the job to take advantage of and develop the individual’s skills and interests. With this alignment the employee should experience task identity and task significance thereby experiencing their work as meaningful. Once the person has been trained in necessary skills and demonstrated competency, some autonomy is necessary for them to feel responsible for what they produce. Skills improve with feedback. Feedback is critical to knowing how well efforts translate into performance. Given meaningful work, knowledge of and a sense of responsibility for our work output, we are motivated to work, do a good job, enjoy the work, come every day, and stay in the position.

Please match the following labels with the corresponding definitions regarding job satisfaction models from this module.

1. Ideal Job A. Low ability, and high interest

2. Core work skills B. High ability, and high interest

3. Energy drainers C. Meaningful work-output responsibility

4. High potential activities D. High ability, and low interest

5. Supporting skills E. Low ability, and low interest

6. Enriched Job F. Intersection of interests, skills, values

Answers: 1-F; 2-B; 3-E; 4-A; 5-D; 6-C

In this module we explored the link between job productivity and satisfaction. Four constructive and ineffective responses to job dissatisfaction were described. People are most satisfied when their job allows them to be competent in work they love. They are often discontent in the long run when they use skills they are rewarded for externally, but there is little or no intrinsic enjoyment of the activities. They are dissatisfied and unproductive when they cannot do the required job tasks well, nor do they enjoy that work. A wonderful way to help improve job satisfaction is to increase one’s abilities in areas of intrinsic interest. The job enrichment model provides the basic strategy for linking task requirements to individual interests, skills, and values to improve job satisfaction and productivity.

Glossary

Ideal job: Employee’s core tasks align with his or her skills/talents/gifts; employee’s interests/passions align with the organizational purpose; employee’s values/life priorities align with work environment/requirements.

Job satisfaction: Positive attitude toward work; comprised of degree of challenge, expectations, fair compensation, the work environment, work relationships, and job-personality fit.

Motivating interests: Interests are the endeavors that attract us naturally. The underlying patterns of work interest are enduring. Motivating interests are the number one driver of job satisfaction over the lifetime.

Skills: Skills are those abilities we do well – usually due to a combination of innate talent, development, and constant positive reinforcement in our lifetimes. Skills are not the primary driver of job satisfaction, although motivating interests and skills together are the strongest predictors of job satisfaction over the lifetime.

Values: Beliefs that guide behavior and judgements, learned from family, peers, friends, teachers, role models, media, etc., and affecting attitudes, perceptions, needs, motivation, and satisfaction at work.

· Evaluating interests, abilities, skills, and values of self/others in relation to job requirements

Answer: There are a number of ways to get additional career counseling assistance. These are a few suggestions to get you started. 1. You could get assistance from a career counselor through your existing employer, a university, or employment agency. Usually there is no cost to you to use these services but you have to be affiliated with those organizations. 2. You could buy self-help books and/or surf the Internet for suggestions about how to explore your career options, find a new job, start your own project/programme purpose, etc. There are many books are written resources available. This would cost you more in time than money. 3. You could go to a career management organization or pay an individual career counselor. This would be the most expensive option, and, you will only get as much out of the sessions are you are willing to put into them. As you can see all three options will cost you time and effort. When it comes to managing your career you will have to do most of the work. The other resources – people or information – merely guide and support your effort.

2. It’s been so long since I dared to dream of doing something I love, I don’t remember. I do not know where to start. Any suggestions?

Answer: Why not ask your friends and family members to describe a time when they saw you very happy and doing something well. Record what they share with you. You’re likely to reminisce. Play it back and search for themes that resonate with you. Then write down the skills and interests associated with those activities. You might have your friends and family members brainstorm skills and interests with you if you get stalled.

Call, interview, and talk to three people who are making a living doing the kinds of things you liked to do. Ask them how they got started.

Answer: Essentially career coaches sort through the various suggestions available in self-help books for career management, select the ones that might be most helpful to you in your situation, and guide you through to achieving some specific career goal. They will even help you define your goal. They also assist you in overcoming the fears, emotional blocks, and confusion associated with changing your life – including helping you handle your financial concerns, reluctant supporters, hesitant family members, and procrastinating habits. They seem to provide the listening skills of a good therapist, the care of a good friend, the intellectual rigor of a good teacher, and the goal orientation of a consultant – and focus their attention on your specific needs and desires. It costs – usually you work together for 1-6 months and pay a fee. Some coaches work by phone, some in person, some do both.