What is job satisfaction

What is the pronunciation of job satisfaction? Browse job quota. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes. Image credits. Word of the Day kind-hearted. About this. Blog Outsets and onsets! Read More. November 08, To top. English Business Translations. Sign up for free and get access to exclusive content:.

Free word lists and quizzes from Cambridge. Tools to create your own word lists and quizzes. This implies that the employee is having satisfaction at job as the work meets the expectations of the individual. Every employee wants a strong career growth and work life balance at workplace. For an employer, job satisfaction for an employee is an important aspect to get the best out of them.

Employers needs to ensure a good job description to attract employees and constantly give opportunities to individuals to learn and grow.

Job satisfaction is related to the psychology of an employee. One of the biggest factors of job satisfaction are the compensation and benefits given to an employee.

An employee with a good salary, incentives, bonuses, healthcare options etc. A healthy workplace environment also adds value to an employee. Job satisfaction for employees is often due a good work life balance policy, which ensures that an employee spends quality time with their family along with doing their work. This improves the employee's quality of work life. Any individual appreciates and feels motivated if they are respected at their workplace.

Also, if they are awarded for their hard work, it further motivates employees. Hence recognition is one of the job satisfaction factors. If an employee is assured that the company would retain them even if the market is turbulent, it gives them immense confidence.

He moves into a new city where he has very few ties with the community. As he develops his career, he begins to build some meaningful work relationships—he becomes a turn-on. The longer he remains in the locale, the more likely he is to become a turn-on-plus. But suppose a time comes when his motivation is low. Will he leave? If benefit programs have created a financial dependency, if he has stock options that are not exercisable for two or three years, if he has children who are in good schools, if he has just purchased his dream house—then he probably will not become a turnover statistic.

Nonetheless, he may become psychologically absent—a turn-off. The consequences may show up in alcoholism, chronic physical or psychological illness, divorce, low productivity and motivation, and perhaps unionization. Suppose, instead, that this same engineer has continued to find job satisfaction. He may still stay for some environmental reasons, and the combination of reasons will probably be right—both he and the company find his employment fulfilling.

In neither case has he become a turnover casualty, but there is a dramatic difference between the two situations in terms of morale and productivity. One purpose of our research is to understand better the balance between job satisfaction and environmental reasons as it affects employee retention and to gain insight into ways to influence that balance.

We designed our research to answer questions like these:. Our respondents gave many reasons for staying. We have broken these down into reasons relating to the environment outside the company—the external environment—and reasons relating to the work environment itself, within the company—the internal environment.

Further, we have broken down the reasons relating to the internal environment into a motivational factors and b maintenance factors. Exhibit II represents these two breakdowns. Each row of symbols in the exhibit is divided into three parts:. Exhibit II. To prepare Exhibit II, we took the ten reasons for staying cited most frequently by the members of a specific employee group and assigned them to the three categories just listed.

For example, employees with college degrees most frequently cited six relating to on-the-job motivation, three relating to job maintenance, and one relating to the environment external to the company.

The exhibit shows that low-skill manufacturing employees stay primarily for maintenance or environmental reasons, many relating to the nonwork environment. These employees will not remain on the payroll because of job satisfaction. To them, factors outside the company are more important. The reasons managers and professionals gave for staying were significantly different.

As Exhibit II shows, managerial and professional employees stay primarily for reasons related to their work and the work environment; six of the top ten reasons they cited for staying were related to job satisfaction, three to the company environment, and only one to the outside environment. These data suggest that managers and professionals are more likely to be turn-ons, while low-skill manufacturing people are very likely to be turn-offs. The moderately skilled manufacturing employees and the clerical people who are not directly involved in the production process more closely resemble the managers and professionals in their reasons for staying than they do low-skill manufacturing people.

However, most organizations tend to treat all manufacturing employees alike in terms of benefits, working conditions, supervision, and pay. This study suggests that many skilled hourly employees would be less dissatisfied and more productive if they were treated more nearly as managers are, rather than as low-skill blue-collar workers are.

In the interest of assessing equal opportunity, we compared whites with nonwhites among hourly employees. Nonwhite minorities cited maintenance and environmental reasons for staying more frequently, without mentioning a single motivation factor among their top ten reasons.

People with less than five years of company service were compared with those with five or more. Employees with shorter service stay for internal reasons, their inertia being strengthened by a combination of job satisfaction and the job setting. However, after five years of service, environmental reasons begin to appear, while internal reasons tend to slip in relative significance. In other words, as in the case of the young engineer, these employees join a company because they want to.

However, as they build family and economic responsibilities, these may displace internal reasons for staying. A similar relationship was found in educational levels. Given the traditional managerial belief that educational level represents a meaningful distinction among employees, we examined the influence of maintenance and external environment on people at various skill levels. Exhibit III shows the percentage of employees, by skill category, who selected various environmental reasons for staying with their companies.

These figures highlight the varied degrees of significance people with different skill levels place on environmental factors:. Exhibit III. Hence there seem to be real differences in the importance the three groups attach to environmental factors. Additionally, we might note that managers are more willing to look for new jobs, even though this may be difficult, whereas the low-skill workers tend to be unwilling to do this.

Exhibit III also shows the significance of environmental factors for employees with different degrees of job satisfaction. Such reasons for staying are self-defeating and hardly could be considered right. These turn-offs have not yet affected turnover statistics, but still they may be having just as severe, or even a more severe, effect on the company.

These employees see themselves as so locked in by the environment that they have little alternative but to stay; and, therefore, the possibility of reduced productivity or behavior antagonistic to the organization is great.

Historically this locked-in, turned-off condition has been considered characteristic of manufacturing or unskilled-labor categories, primarily. However, recent reports of increased union interest at the managerial level suggest that it is occurring at higher levels of the organization as well.

One study shows that alienation is not limited to the hourly ranks, but may occur at any level of an organization. We gained some insight into why an employee stays with a company when he is dissatisfied with his job, supervisor, benefits, pay, and so on. These employees are excellent examples of personnel who have not affected the turnover statistics but who may have left the company, psychologically, long ago.

This finding illustrates the fact that the reasons people stay are not necessarily the opposite of the reasons why people leave.

One often hears negative statements about supervisors and jobs in exit interviews; yet, of the employees we studied, many who made such statements are still with the companies about which they complain.

These are the turn-offs. Moreover, it suggests that these employees do not have as much job mobility as many companies assume.

The reinforcement that environmental factors give to the inertia of these alienated employees must be quite powerful, and it will probably take a strong force to break their inertia—in extreme cases, discharge. It might be concluded at this point that level in the organization, race, tenure, education, and degree of job satisfaction determine why people stay. However, we found a factor more potent than any of these—namely, the work ethic of the people involved in the study. Human beings exist at different levels of psychological development, and these levels are expressed in the values they hold respecting their work.

This level of psychological development is restricted primarily to infants, people with serious brain deterioration, and certain psychopathic conditions. For practical purposes, employees are not ordinarily found at Level 1. These employees are best suited to jobs that offer easy work, friendly people, fair play, and, above all, a good boss. An employee at this level believes that he may not have the best job in the world, but he does as well as others with jobs like his.

He likes a boss who tells him exactly what to do and how to do it, and who encourages him by doing it with him. The two major requirements of a job for this employee are that it pay well and keep people off his back. He does not care for any kind of work that ties him down, but he will do it if he must in order to get some money. Because of the raw, rugged value system of this employee, he needs a boss who is tough, but allows him to be tough too.

This employee likes a job which is secure, where the rules are followed, and no favoritism is shown. He feels that he has worked hard for what he has and thinks he deserves some good breaks.

Others, he believes, should realize that it is their duty to work. The ideal job for this employee is one which is full of variety, allows some free wheeling and dealing, and offers pay and bonus on the basis of results. He feels he is responsible for his own success and is constantly on the lookout for new opportunities. A good boss for this employee understands the politics of getting the job done, knows how to bargain, and is firm but fair.