A social work study on job satisfaction

Article history: Received October 10, 2011 Received in Revised form October, 3, 2011 Accepted 10 December 2011 Available online 15 December 2011 Job satisfaction plays an important role on having sustainable growth in any business units. When an unsatisfied employee leaves, the business unit not only loses an employee but also it loses an intangible asset. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate overall job satisfaction occasionally and provide some guidelines for improving work conditions. The proposed study of this paper uses five questionnaires, which are associated with job motivation, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. We have selected 25 sample employees who work for the case study of this research located in west region on Iran. Using some statistical tests we analyze the data and the preliminary results indicate that employee have an average job satisfaction. The results indicate that there are some positive relationships between job satisfaction and other factors including wage increase, psychological needs, physical equipments, entertainment equipment and work-team. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Job satisfaction plays an important role on having sustainable growth in any business units.When a dissatisfied employee leaves, the business unit not only loses an employee but also it loses an intangible asset.During the past few decades, there have been tremendous efforts to study important factors influencing job satisfaction (Wild, 1970).The selection of a job depends on various factors such as various factors such as place, job title.Boschmann (2011) investigated job access, location decision, and the working poor in a qualitative study in the Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area.Giannikis and Mihail (2011) investigated the difference between part time and full time job satisfaction in an empirical study held in Greek among retail workers.They investigated on why fulltime and part-time retail employees had various attitudes by tracing the different predictors of job satisfaction.In their study, they gathered data from 488 Greek retail employees based on a structured questionnaire.They reported that work status significantly influence job satisfaction of employees using the results of a comprehensive regression analysis.The results of their survey provided some guidelines on how to enhance the job satisfaction of their employees.Burrell et al. (1997) presented equal job opportunities for women employees in the hospitality industry by comparing data different countries of France, Italy, Spain and the UK.Winterhager et al. (2006) presented a micro-econometric evaluation of an innovative voucher scheme in Germany.They explained that job placement vouchers could be stated as a way to spur competition between public and private job placement activities.The German government launched this tool to end the public placement monopoly and to subsidize its private competitors.They examined very rich administrative data from the federal employment agency and used propensity score matching as a method to solve the basic evaluation problem and to provide the effect of the vouchers.They reported positive treatment effects on the employment probability after one year of 6.5 percentage points in Western Germany and presented a measure for deadweight loss.Gil et al. (2008) studied the roles of service encounters and value, and job satisfaction in achieving customer satisfaction in business relationships.They argued that job satisfaction of service employees is one of the most important components of customer evaluation of service result and claimed little in-depth research into the nature of B2B relations.They developed some hypotheses, which established the mediator impact of service value and the moderator influence of job satisfaction of service employees when customer satisfaction is delimited.They concluded that service encounter directly and substantially impacts perceived service value.Judge et al. (2010) performed a comprehensive study to measure the relationship between job pay and job satisfaction.Surprisingly, they reported that pay level is only marginally associated with job satisfaction.Chen (2008) studied job satisfaction among the people who work in information system (IS) sectors.They investigated relationships between achievement motivation and job characteristics on job satisfaction among IS employees.Their results disclosed that the dimensions of the achievement motivation of IS personnel were perseverance, competition and difficulty control and in terms of job characteristics, task identity, professionalism, feedback, autonomy and significance were important.Job characteristics can influence the job satisfaction of IS employee and job characteristics and job satisfaction are correlated, positively.They reported that jobs with the features of feedback, professionalism and autonomy could easily elevate the job satisfaction among IS personnel.Kriesi et al. (2010) investigated in job opportunities for men and women in the Swiss labor market 1962-1989.They explained job opportunities for salient groups of labor-market participants and their ranking within the labor queues based on separate regression analyses for men and women.Their findings were different in terms of gender and indicated that macro-level processes, such as the economic cycle, play an important role for men's job opportunities.They also specified that job opportunities strongly depend on occupational credentials whereas educational attainment is a minor part.Chi (1999) presented a study on job placement for handicapped workers using job analysis data.Hurd and Panis (2006) examined the choice to cash out pension rights at change or retirement.Raymo and Lim (2011) studied educational changes in married women's labor force attachment in Japan using 10 waves of information from a nationally representative survey.They concluded that university graduates are both more likely to remain in and less likely to reenter the labor force relative to women with a high school education or less.Their relatively low likelihood of labor force exit reflects educational changes in occupational characteristics, especially employment in full-time and standard jobs.However, junior college and university graduates remain substantially less likely to reenter the labor force net of family circumstances, characteristics of previous employment, and efforts to control for unobserved characteristics.They concluded with speculation about the implications of these educational differences in married women's employment for stratification.Zalewska (2011) studied the relationship between anxiety and job satisfaction.They reported that two forms of job-related anxiety were negatively correlated with the level of satisfaction but were not related to diversification in satisfaction.The study also disclosed some evidence supporting the adaptive impact of anxiety and individual properties as its moderators.Delfgaauw (2007) investigated that workers' satisfaction with various job domains not only affects whether but also where workers look for another job based on a survey data of public sector employees in the Netherlands.They explained that workers attempt to quit their jobs when they feel uncomfortable with an organization-specific job domain, e.g.management.On the contrary, when workers are dissatisfied with a job domain, which differs significantly across jobs within an organization, they normally considered for another position in their current organization.He reported dissatisfaction with job domains normally involves with an industry-specific component, such as job duties, drives workers out of their industry.Theodossiou and Zangelidis (2009) studied the relationship between job tenure and job satisfaction and considered whether tenure-job satisfaction profiles were contingent on career advancement opportunities.They concluded that the job satisfaction of individuals employed in jobs with career prospects was not only higher compared with those who were not, but also their returns to tenure in terms of job satisfaction were significantly higher.Sabharwal (2011) studied job satisfaction patterns of scientists and engineers by status of birth.They investigated job satisfaction of foreign-born scientists and engineers in academia and compared them with US-born and reported that despite higher research productivity, foreign-born are less satisfied than their native-born peers.
The present study of this paper investigates the job satisfaction in one the biggest provinces of Iran, Esfahan.The proposed study of this paper first presents details of our survey in section 2 and section 3 provides the results of our investigation.Finally, concluding remarks are given in the last to summarize the contribution of this paper.

The proposed study
The proposed study of this paper selects 25 employees from an agricultural industry in a province of Esfahan, Iran.The Cronbach Alpha (Cronbach, 1951) was 0.87, which confirms the relaiability of the results.
There are five hypotheses associated with the proposed study of this paper and they are investigated the relationship between job satisfaction of employee and managers in terms of wage increase, psychological needs, physical equipments, entertainment equipments and team-work, respectively.The study uses mean, mode and median as primary statistics to measure the impact of the relationships and Skewness and Strain tests are used to confirm normality of the data.

Results
In this section, we present details of our finding on the relationships between job satisfaction between employees and management team in terms of five key factors mentioned earlier in the hypothesis.The first hypothesis studies the relationship between job satisfaction between employee and management team of the case study in terms of wage increase.Table 1 shows details of the relationship between job satisfaction between employee and management team of the case study.Based on the results of Table 1, it seems that there is a little difference between mode, mean and median and since both Skewness Strain coefficients are less than one, we can conclude that our statistics are normally distributed and we can use parametric tools to interpret the data.
The second question of the survey is associated whether there is any relationship between job satisfaction of employee and managers in terms of psychological needs of employees and the results are given in Table 2. Based on the results of Table 2, it is clear that there is a little difference between mode, mean and median and since both Skewness Strain coefficients are less than one and we can conclude that our statistics are normally distributed and we can use mean to interpret the data.
The third hypothesis of the survey is associated whether there is any relationship between job satisfaction of employee and managers in terms of physical equipments provided for employees and the results are given in Table 3.Based on the results of Table 3, it can be observed that there is a little difference between mode, mean and median and since both Skewness Strain coefficients are less than one and we can conclude that our statistics are normally distributed and we can use mean to interpret the data.
The fourth hypothesis of the survey is associated whether there is any relationship between job satisfaction of employee and managers in terms of entertainment equipments provided for employees and the results are given in Table 4. Based on the results of Table 4, it can be observed that there is a little difference between mode, mean and median and since both Skewness Strain coefficients are less than one and we can conclude that our statistics are normally distributed and we can use mean to interpret the data.
The fifth hypothesis of the survey is associated whether there is any relationship between job satisfaction of employee and managers in terms of team-work provided for employees and the results are given in Table 5.Based on the results of Table 5, it can be observed that there is a little difference between mode, mean and median and since both Skewness Strain coefficients are less than one and we can conclude that our statistics are normally distributed and we can use mean to interpret the data.
In summary, we can conclude that job satisfaction plays an important role on having sustainable growth in any business units.When a unsatisfied employee leaves, the business unit not only loses an employee but also it loses an intangible asset.Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate overall job satisfaction occasionally and provide some guidelines for improving work conditions.The results of our study reveal that job satisfaction could be increased through enhancing better equipments, encouraging people to work in team group, etc.

Conclusion
The proposed study of this paper implemented five questionnaires, which are associated with job motivation, job satisfaction and organizational commitment.We have selected 25 sample employees who work for the case study of this research located in west region on Iran.Using some statistical tests we analyze the data and the preliminary results indicate that employee have an average job satisfaction.The results indicated that there were some positive relationships between job satisfaction and other factors including wage increase, psychological needs, physical equipments, entertainment equipment and work-team.

Table 1
Statistical data associated with the relationship between job satisfaction of employee and managers in terms of wage increase

Table 2
Statistical data associated with the relationship between job satisfaction of employee and managers in terms of psychological needs

Table 3
Statistical data associated with the relationship between job satisfaction of employee and managers in terms of physical equipments

Table 4
Statistical data associated with the relationship between job satisfaction of employee and managers in terms of entertainment equipments

Table 5
Statistical data associated with the relationship between job satisfaction of employee and managers in terms of team-work