A person’s own personality has quite a strong impact on his/her job satisfaction. High positive affect is marked by feelings of excitement and enthusiasm while high negative affect is marked by feeling of fear, sadness, guilt and anger. Neuroticism and extroversion provide the psychological context in which people experience their work. And therefore strong relations exist between measures of Positive Affect (PA) and Negative Affect (NA) and job satisfaction. Likewise there is quite a strong relation between the marital status of the worker and job satisfaction. If he is married he feels the need to be more job satisfied cause he has to look after his family and as job being the only means of income.
2) Social Factors- relations with co-workers play a very important role. If the worker has a good relation with his co-workers, he is bound to be more satisfied by his job than those who don’t have a god relation with their co-workers. Alienation at work also has a great impact on job satisfaction. This might bring in a feeling of powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation and self-estrangement which over all leads to a very low level or zero level job satisfaction. Also employees are more satisfied when they have challenging opportunities at work. This includes chances to participate in interesting projects, informal groups, jobs with a satisfying degree of challenge and opportunities for increased responsibility. Important: this is not simply "promotional opportunity." As organizations have become flatter, promotions can be rare. People have found challenge through projects, team leadership, greater interaction, special assignments-as well as promotions.
3) Cultural Factors- these are values, culture, religion, ethnic background, family relationships, primary language and communication style of the individual. Differences in your experience and backgrounds affect your interactions with your co-workers and your customers. How you react to different situations often has as much to do with the personal experiences you have been through as with the situation itself. Interpersonal skills are very important and your actions and behavior make a positive difference in the workplace. Customs vary according to cultural groups. Areas of potential difference may include eye contact, formality in addressing others, conversational styles, behavior at meetings, body language and distance, group versus individual performance, language barriers and accents among others. All these matters have impact on their overall job satisfaction.
4) Organisational Factors- can have a significant impact on people’s commitment, well-being, and overall performance. Key elements include: the Supervisor’s Style (supportive or non-supportive), Role Identity (having a clear purpose and a positive view of the organisation), facing challenging Job Demands, and the level of Team Support. Also rules and regulation, company policies, time frames, equal opportunities provision, the opportunities, threats and pressures that are arising from both mature and new technologies etc affect job satisfaction.
5) Environmental Factors- these can be divided into two categories: internal and external. Internal issues like who is the power dynamic and decision maker, the relationships among people working in the organization, competition in the organization, the decore, ambience, layout etc have affect on job satisfaction of the employees. For a poor layout, bad ambience and unstable relations lead to a very low level of job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is also influenced by external issues like the political, economical, social and technological environment in which the organization survives. For e.g. if the organization is in a very competitive industry then due to work-overload there is quite a lot of stress on the workers making them less job satisfied.
There is a doubt whether job satisfaction consists of a single dimension or a number of separate dimensions. There is also a wide range of factors which influence job satisfaction including for e.g. Herzberg’s hygiene and motivating factors. This shows that there can many possible approaches in which to examine the subject area. Some of the major factors which have a particular influence on job satisfaction include:
a) Frustration and alienation- Alienation at work also has a great impact on job satisfaction. This might bring in a feeling of powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation and self-estrangement (Blauner) which over all leads to a very low level or zero level job satisfaction. Blauner found that most manual workers were alienated to some degree. The extent of alienation experienced is likely to be a function of the nature of technology. Assembly line technology was found to be the most alienating e.g. at Ford while craft technology was the least.
b) The nature of technology- the work of Blauner has drawn attention to the nature of technology as a major influence on job satisfaction. Walker and Guest examined the effect of mass production, assembly line work on employee behaviour. They describe the characteristics of assembly line as: repetitious and machine paced, predetermined techniques with no choice of tools and methods. The nature of the job and high level of noise restricted the amount of social interaction among workers. The workers had higher rates of absenteeism and low levels of job satisfaction. With the increasing advances in today’s technology, the dot com industry expects a lot of the employees in the IT industry. But even amid all the turmoil, IT professionals have remained overwhelmingly positive about job security, access to new technologies and their salaries, according to the results of Computerworld's 2001 Annual Job Satisfaction Survey.
c) Meaningful work and nature of supervision- Myers examined the nature of meaningful work and determined the meaningfulness of work through a series of questions: i) in terms of supervisor’s insight into scope of meaningful work; and ii) an analysis of work by job incumbents themselves. We can see that the nature of the supervisor is another factor which can influence the satisfaction people obtain from their work. Kindly and thoughtful leader behaviour is likely to generate higher worker satisfaction.
d) Work and psychological well-being- Warr has examined variations in jobs, and aspects and types of work which enhance or impair psychological well-being. In order to increase employee well-being, jobs were redesigned so that workers could have greater control over pace of their work, distribution of task and general organization of time and effort. Companies like Hewlett Packard and IBM carry out such activities so that they can deliver their employees a high level of job satisfaction.
e) Stress at work- there is no doubt at all the stress influences levels of job satisfaction heavily. Stress is a source of tension and frustration. One of the major sources of stress is role in congruency and role conflict. Role stress can lead to difficulties in communication, worker’s health and interpersonal relationships.
f) Work organization and individual job design- the application of motivational theories and greater understanding of dimensions of job satisfaction and work performance, have led to increasing interest in job design. The nature of work organization and the design of jobs can have a significant effect on the job satisfaction of staff. Job design is concerned with the relationship between workers and the nature and content of jobs, and their task functions attempting to meet people’s personal and social needs at work while enhancing personal satisfaction they derive from work and make best use of people as a valuable resource. Earlier job design concentrated on the restructuring of individual jobs and the application of three main methods:
i) Job Rotation- is the most basic form of individual job design. It involves moving a person from one job task to another. It attempts to add some variety in the same old boring work routine. It is mainly a form of acquisition of new skills rather than necessarily developing skills, not only this it is also a form of training and may help the employee relate more completely to the final product or service.
ii) Job Enlargement- it is achieved by combining a number of related operations at the same level. Job enlargement is horizontal job design; it makes a job structurally bigger and gives more variety.
iii) Job Enrichment- this is the extension of the more basic job rotation and job enlargement methods of job design. It arose out of Herzberg’s two-factor theory. It attempts to enrich the job by incorporating motivating or growth factors such as increased responsibility, involvement, opportunities and sense of achievement. Job enrichment involves vertical job enlargement aiming to give the person greater autonomy and authority over planning, execution and control while focusing on intrinsic satisfaction. Empirical support for b) comprehensive model of job enrichment is mixed. Hackman and Oldham from their own studies claim that people with enriched jobs, and high score level on the questionnaire of Job Diagnostic Survey, experienced more satisfaction and internal motivation. The core job dimensions of skill variety, task identity and task significance combined to predict the level of experienced meaningfulness of the work.
g) Quality of Working Life- QWL programs include and incorporate teamwork and employee participation in decision making that influence workers’ satisfaction. General Motors was a leader and innovator in using QWL teams in 1970. Later Saturn, a GM division, organized union representatives into planning groups. The QWL initiatives also include such policies as flextime working schedules, working at home and off site childcare for employees and autonomous work teams.
h) Quality circles- are another contemporary approach to job redesign. This concept was invented in the United States and taken to Japan by W.Edward Deming (the late guru of Total Quality Management). The quality circles are groups of employees ranging in size from 4 to 30 members. The groups meet during working hours to identify and problem solve job concerned issues such as improving communication, reducing production errors, decision making capacity, promotion etc which overall gives a better work value and satisfaction. During the 1980s, over 90% of the Fortune 500 companies had some form of quality circles which included Hewlett Packard.
Managers of organizations must take into careful accounts of the above discussed factors that affect job satisfaction. Every job must be designed in the best interests of the employee. Total Quality Management, Quality circles, job rotation, stress-removal programs etc must be carried out in order to uplift the level of job satisfaction among employees. Not only this but managers must not only provide good ‘Hygiene factors’ like promotion, company policies, supervision, salary, interpersonal relations and working conditions but also concentrate on the ‘Motivator’ factors. In a national survey on employee job satisfaction, income and benefits ranked fifth and sixth in terms of importance. Although income and benefits may attract someone to your company, these alone are inadequate to foster long-term relationships. The development of long-term relationships should be fairly high on your priority list. Here are some ideas that managers can pick up to improve employee job satisfaction:
a) Personal recognition: How many times during a week do the managers tell their employees what a great job they are doing or how important they are to the growth of the company? Put it on a daily schedule to recognize at least one person for something he/she has done. Simple things like keeping a box of notes on your desk so you acknowledge someone weekly in a written format is very effective.
b) Feedback is a requirement-Typically in a group of 50 managers or business owners, only two or three people have told their employees how they are doing. Managers must let their employees know what they are doing well and the areas for improvement.
c) Information is power- Get your employees involved in reading and understanding a balance sheet. Letting them know what sales and expenses are for the month and asking them for their suggestions on ways to increase sales and decrease costs brings a feeling of attachment to the organization consequently increasing the job satisfaction of the workers. They see things from a different perspective which is also very beneficial for the company.
d) Appreciation is essential- when the employees show a good progress they must be appreciated for it or else they will not be motivated to do further good work. Motivation also increases a sense of satisfaction derived from work and they will feel a sense of achievement.
e) Reward- Get your employees involved in defining what rewards would motivate them. A national company with 900 locations set up a study to compare cash versus non-cash rewards. The non-cash group out performed the cash group by a 46 percent margin while generating a 37 percent increase in sales, in comparison to the previous 6 months without an incentive program. Simple, inexpensive rewards can make a big difference in employee job satisfaction and retention. It's the small things that tell your employees you care.
All these tips will definitely bring about improvement in the employees’s overall job satisfaction. In today's business and legal climate, it is important to understand how to effectively deal with employees. Unfortunately, people are often ill-prepared for the manager's role when they take it on. But if they neglect the employees it is going to hit bad on the company’s success. Hence it is very important for the manager to recognize this phenomenon and value employees and treat them as a precious asset of the organization.
