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First Day on the Job Vivian Quattlebaum Strayer University Human Resource Management/HRM530 August 25, 2011 Abstract Job satisfaction describes how content an individual is with his or her job. The happier people are within their job, the more satisfied they are said to be. Job satisfaction is not the same as motivation or aptitude, although it is clearly linked. Job design aims to enhance job satisfaction and performance. Methods include job rotation, enlargement, enrichment and re-engineering. Other influences on satisfaction include the management style and culture, employee involvement, empowerment and autonomous work position.
Job satisfaction is a very important attribute which is frequently measured by organizations. The most common way of measurement is the use of rating scales where employees report their reactions to their jobs. Questions relate to rate of pay, work responsibilities, variety of tasks, promotional opportunities, the work itself and co-workers. Some questioners ask yes or no questions while others ask to rate satisfaction on 1-5 scale (where 1 represents “not at all satisfied” and 5 represents “extremely satisfied”). Some argue that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, a motivation theory, laid the foundation for job satisfaction theory.
This theory explains that people seek to satisfy five specific needs in life – physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, self-esteem needs, and self-actualization. Job satisfaction can also be seen within the broader context of the range of issues which affect an individual’s experience of work, or their quality of working life. Job satisfaction can be understood in terms of its relationships with other key factors, such as general well-being, stress at work, control at work, home-work interface, and working conditions. First Day on the Job Job satisfaction has been defined as a pleasurable emotional state resulting rom the appraisal of one’s job; an affective reaction to one’s job; and an attitude towards one’s job. Weiss (2002) has argued that job satisfaction is an attitude but points out that researchers should clearly distinguish the objects of cognitive evaluation which are affect (emotion), beliefs and behaviors. This definition suggests that we form attitudes towards our jobs by taking into account our feelings, our beliefs, and our behaviors. Discuss the factors causing the employee’s dissatisfaction. Burnout is psychological phenomenon involving emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and a decline in feelings of competence about work.
Employees who experience burnout will exhibit several symptoms: 1) feelings of being overextended and emotionally drained; 2) indifference or a distant attitude towards work; and 3) reduced expectations of continued effectiveness. (Nico Shutte, Salla Toppinen, Raija Kalimo and Wilmar Schaufeli, 2000) Organizations must address the challenge of burnout, or their employees may quit. High levels of burnout are associated with low levels of commitment and high turnover intentions. (Raymond T. Lee and Blake E. Ashforth, 1995) Organizations that do not keep an eye out for symptoms of burnout may waste their investments in employee development.
Mood and emotions form the affective element of job satisfaction. (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996). Moods tend to be longer lasting but often weaker states of uncertain origin, while emotions are often more intense, short-lived and have a clear object or cause. There is some evidence in the literature that moods are related to overall job satisfaction. Positive and negative emotions were also found to be significantly related to overall job satisfaction. Frequency of experiencing net positive emotion will be a better predictor of overall job satisfaction than will intensity of positive emotion when it is experienced.
Emotion work (or emotion management) refers to various types of efforts to manage emotional states and displays. Emotion management includes all of the conscious and unconscious efforts to increase, maintain, or decrease one or more components of an emotion. Although early studies of the consequences of emotional work emphasized its harmful effects on workers, studies of workers in a variety of occupations suggest that the consequences of emotional work are not uniformly negative. Identify which of these factors could be addressed with improvements in the way the organization handles development as described in the chapter.
As stated above, organizations that do not keep an eye out for symptoms of burnout may waste their investments in employee development. If an employee who is given multi-source feedback, mentors, and an enriched job becomes overwhelmed by the balancing of current work demands and the time required for developing new skills, he may experience burnout and leave the organization. Organizations can provide programs which help to minimize some of the feeling of burnout or emotional work by providing programs which help the employee to better manage work/life balance.
Currently the average American family has to juggle two jobs as well as other life obligations, such as running the household and raising children. Organizations can relive the strain of the above by providing flexible work schedules, assistance with child care and offer time offer to deal with family illnesses. Having programs such as this benefit both the employer and the employee as their basic and most common needs are being met by offsetting stresses in these areas.
Having these types of programs is seen as a positive even by employees who would not otherwise use them. More employees would be more committed to an organization that appears to be family-friendly. Employees like to feel valued and knowing the company cares about their work/life balance. Discuss what Malik should do tomorrow with regard to his employee. Malik should come to work and ask to meet with the employee to continue the discussion of yesterday. Malik should also express his concerns about losing such an invaluable employee.
After hearing what the employee had to say, Malik should point out to the employee the positive skills she brings to the team and emphasize that she would be an asset to the team should she remain on board. Malik should then illustrate how he intends to utilize her as a model going forward in order to better develop the rest of the team. Malik then has to ask the employee to provide him with a synopsis of what she feels is the most overwhelming aspect of her job and have her rate her discouragement based on a measureable scale.
This can be done using scale 1-5; or extremely satisfied to not at all satisfied. He can then partner with the employee to solicit opinion data from other counterparts so the two of them together can come up with a plan to make things better. Providing an employee who is no longer happy with what they do with a project that gets to the root cause and includes them in the process of resolving the issue is a great way to becoming a trusted and effective leader. Identify long-term changes should Malik suggest for this organization, if it appears that his employee is not the only one with these complaints?
Malik will need to take the information gathered from the project above and set a system in place for the employees to be able to provide feedback in a genuine forum to come to a common ground on how to make things better. One way to do this is to provide training and development programs with an exit-survey at the end of the program to see if the training in fact would have a direct impact on the current work that is being done. This can be done through competency models. This allows for Malik to strategically staff important positions with people who have the right characteristics.
Employees are then able to identify their needs while at the same time able to pursue their career development process. It is usually a four-step process of self-assessment, reality check, goal setting and action planning. Discuss the human resource policies and programs that would support development programs within the organization. Five critical issues are important to career development. They are as follows: 1) Orienting new employees, 2) reducing burnout, 3) helping employees manage a work-family balance, 4) developing a diverse workforce, and 5) assisting employees on international assignments.
Each is critical to ensuring that employees who are recipients of development do not leave the organization. Failing to meet these challenges is a sure-fire way to encourage affected employees to quit and take their skills to another organization, possibly a competitor. In discussing the above, we’ve again come upon the need for the employer to implement programs such as child care assistance, flexible hours, time off to deal with arising family issues as discussed above. Some other development programs can be modeled after the company AFLAC.
They have developmental programs which include: 1) support for industry-wide certification training, 2) a three-sequence leadership development program that helps managers as they progress through their careers, 3) learning opportunities available to all employees via online courses and workshops offered onsite and 4) scholarships that enable employees to pursue educational opportunities for personal growth. These programs help to attract and retain great employees and also help employees grow and pursue fulfilling careers within the organization. Conclusion
Job Satisfaction can be an important indicator of how employees feel about their jobs and a predictor of work behaviors such as organizational citizenship, absenteeism, and turnover. Further, job satisfaction can partially mediate the relationship of personality variables and deviant work behaviors. One common research finding is that job satisfaction is correlated with life satisfaction. This correlation is reciprocal, meaning people who are satisfied with life tend to be satisfied with their job and people who are satisfied with their job tend to be satisfied with life.
However, some research has found that job satisfaction is not significantly related to life satisfaction when other variables such as non-work satisfaction and core self-evaluations are taken into account. An important finding for organizations is that job satisfaction has a rather tenuous correlation to productivity on the job. This is a vital piece of information, as the idea that satisfaction and job performance are directly related to one another is often cited in the media and in some non-academic management literature.
A recent meta-analysis found an average uncorrected correlation between job satisfaction and productivity to be; the average true correlation, corrected for research artifacts and unreliability. Further, the meta-analysis found that the relationship between satisfaction and performance can be moderated by job complexity, such that for high-complexity jobs the correlation between satisfaction and performance is higher than for jobs of low to moderate complexity. Job Satisfaction also has high relationship with intention to quit.
It is found that Job Satisfaction can lead to Intention to Stay / Quit in an organization (Kim et al. , 1996). In short, the relationship of satisfaction to productivity is not necessarily straightforward and can be influenced by a number of other work-related constructs, and the notion that “a happy worker is a productive worker” should not be the foundation of organizational decision-making. The link between job satisfaction and performance is thought to be a spurious relationship; instead, both satisfaction and performance are the result of personality.
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