What is the foundational piece to employment? Depending on who you ask, you may get a different answer. Across the board, most people can agree that job satisfaction is very important, if not the most important element to work. Job satisfaction though, is quite complicated and many factors contribute to it.
The first contributing element to job satisfaction are job characteristics. According to Fried and Ferris (1987 as cited in Gruman et al., 2016), five elements contribute to job characteristics. The following list is ordered by most important to least important elements.
- Autonomy (control over how to conduct job)
- Skill variety (performing variety of tasks)
- Job feedback (feedback about effectiveness of work)
- Task significance (work is seen as important)
- Task identity (can see work from beginning to end)
One may think that if a few of these important elements are lacking, an individual may not like their job. Well, other elements contribute to job satisfaction as well, such as social/organizational factors and personal dispositions.
Social and organizational factors include how much social influence one has at their job, supervisor/employee relationship, promotion opportunities and equitable rewards for work accomplished. Personal dispositions include one’s self-esteem, locus of control, and emotional stability.
Now that job satisfaction has been thoroughly defined, let’s take a case study. Recently, I started a job at a new company. Overall, I’m not feeling very satisfied. This model can help me determine what could be improved in my job satisfaction.
I begin my job assessment by evaluating the job characteristics of my new role. I have what feels like little autonomy on how to conduct my job. I am forced to come into the office 40 hours per week, which is unnecessary for my role. Although autonomy is expected to have a 34% correlational effect for global job satisfaction, I have a painful childhood history of autonomy being taken away from me, so my need for autonomy may be higher than the average individual. It is safe to say this is more than a 34% ding to my job dissatisfaction. I don’t perform a variety of tasks. I almost solely focus on creating a database for clinical work. I do receive feedback frequently, which is important to me. I believe my work is seen as important on my team. In fact, the NIH forces teams to hire Database Managers (my role) as a paid position because of how important the work is. Overall, I’d say I feel slightly bad about my job characteristics.
I have a lot of influence on my job, since I am well-experienced in what I do and no one else on my team is. My relationship with my manager is okay for the most part, other than the WFH conflict, and we talk about future promotions. My social and organizational factors make me mediocrely happy. Personally, I have decent self-esteem. I know I can perform the work being expected of me if I put in the time. I have a external locus of control, so the fact that I cannot work from home is very much bothersome to me. It feels like there’s little I can do to change this situation. I am quite emotional. My personal disposition may be hindering my happiness.
Overall, I seem to have job characteristics that don’t make me happy, moderate social and organizational factors, and a sensitive personal disposition, making my overall job satisfaction not very high in my new role. It is helpful to look at the contributing factors so that small improvements can be made to create a better experience.
References
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (Eds.). (2016). Applied social psychology : Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. SAGE Publications, Incorporated.
I think this blog post shows a lot of self-awareness and yielded some really interesting insights that I hope you’re able to take to your manager to see if there’s a way to adjust your current work environment to work better for you. On a personal note, I have similar issues with the loss of autonomy and I’ve found that micro-management is one of those situations I can’t function in. As COVID changed on a global level what we perceive as able to be done in the WFH environment as opposed to in-office, it’s frustrating that organisations are still insisting on a return to prior norms.
Mckenzie brought up some great points on autonomy and its role in the workplace as well as the generational divide, and as an Xennial, I was curious to see where I would end up in this divide. Not too surprisingly for a 1982 baby raised by Boomer parents, I tend to fall somewhere in the middle, though I do lean toward Millennial when it comes to task significance being the most important factor in job satisfaction for me (closely followed by autonomy). One thing that I hadn’t known prior to reading the studies Mckenzie cited is that generational divides in the workplace seem to be a North American phenomenon rather than a global one, as other regions and countries didn’t experience the same post-WWII baby boom (Schullery, 2013). As the Boomer generation has begun to retire, businesses are forced to re-evaluate how their workplaces operate to accommodate the differing outlooks of Gen X and Millennial workers being hired to fill the vacancies.
Schullery, N. M. (2013). Workplace engagement and generational differences in values. Business Communication Quarterly, 76(2), 252-265.
Productivity gains from teleworking in the post covid-19 ERA: How can public policies make it happen? OECD. (n.d.). Retrieved October 10, 2022, from https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/productivity-gains-from-teleworking-in-the-post-covid-19-era-a5d52e99/
This is probably by far one of my favorite blog posts I’ve read this semester. It’s challenged me to do the same thing and see where my analysis would take me in relation to my own job satisfaction. To me, task significance is much higher on my list to contribute to satisfaction. I don’t want to accomplish work that is meaningless or not useful. Maybe it’s the Millennial in me that strives for that. Millennials are cited as being reluctant to accomplish work they deem meaningless (Schullery, 2013). Because of these values, older generations tend to view Millennials as entitled or selfish (Schullery, 2013).
Additionally, individual creativity is stifled when job autonomy is not felt or experienced (Sripirabaa & Maheswari, 2015). It’s also noted that freedom is essential for employees even when accomplishing everyday tasks (Sripirabaa & Maheswari, 2015). In order for a company (and their employees) to grow with new, innovative ideas, job autonomy must be incorporated (Sripirabaa & Maheswari, 2015). However, autonomy should still have some defined limitations or else it loses its positive effects on the organization (Sripirabaa & Maheswari, 2015).
Have you thought of having a conversation with your manager to identify ways that you could have more freedom? Specifically, is it freedom within your schedule that you desire? Or is it more so within the way you execute your tasks? Knowing where you want the most autonomy may be the best step in communicating that up the chain.
References
Schullery, N. M. (2013). Workplace engagement and generational differences in values. Business Communication Quarterly, 76(2), 252-265.
Sripirabaa, B., & Maheswari, S. T. (2015). Individual creativity: Influence of job autonomy and willingness to take risk. SCMS Journal of Indian Management, 12(4), 110.