Job satisfaction: factors, outcomes, and measurement

Job Satisfaction

My current level of job satisfaction is modest. There is a reason I am going to school and getting a better job is a big part of that! There are things that I like about the job, but as far as compensation and opportunity are concerned it is definitely lacking in those respects.

Landy and Conte (2013) note that there are several factors from the worker's perspective that can affect job satisfaction. Work-life balance is one of them. When a job does not pay much, you often need to work extra hours or have a second job in order to meet the financial needs of you and your family. This affects the work-life balance in that the balance is entirely tilted to work and never to life. For me, having more opportunity might not immediately pay dividends with respect to working less but it could, and I would have more freedom to set my hours as well.

The authors note that the locus of control is something that affects one's motivation. I strongly believe in a high locus of control, where it is my responsibility to affect the changes in life that I want to see. So where there is a level of job dissatisfaction it partly results from feeling that I have less control over my life than I would prefer and my current actions like going to school are an attempt for me to seize that power back and take control over my life and income.

I can also analyze my level of job satisfaction using Maslow's hierarchy. This is an interesting way to look at my job, actually. While the job is pretty good for meeting my social needs, it does not really meet my financial needs in any serious way, and it does not meet actualization needs either. Thus, my job satisfaction is generally low, even though I have a lot of fun. At the end of the day, even if I received a raise I still think I would be driven by my need for actualization. This is important to me, and is a big motivator for me to work harder and get into a position where I can feel actualized.

The fact that there is a social element to my work helps, because it means that my attitudes and behaviors on the job are quite positive. It makes getting through a shift feel good, and that allows me to thrive in an environment that is otherwise not that conducive. I feel that if the social factors were not in place, I would genuinely dislike my job, rather than simply see it as something that does not meet my long-term objectives. It is entirely possible that if I transferred locations, I would actually dislike my job because the social dynamic would be different.

An interesting study by Ealias and George (2012) shows that there is a link between emotional intelligence and job satisfaction. This is interesting, because I do not really know where I score on emotional intelligence. However, it does point to the importance of interpersonal factors in job satisfaction, that being better able to understand other people, get along with them and generally resolve conflict in the workplace is something that would lead to a higher level of job satisfaction. In that sense it is possible that my high level of social satisfaction relates to high emotional intelligence that makes an otherwise unsatisfactory job enjoyable in the short run.