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.