EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION INDEX (ESI)

A) INTRODUCTION

1. Job satisfaction or Employee Satisfaction Index (ESI) has been defined in many different ways.

2. Some believe it is simply how content an individual is with his or her job, in other words, whether or not they like the job or individual aspects or facets of jobs, such as nature of work or supervision.

3. Others believe it is not as simplistic as this definition suggests and instead that multidimensional psychological responses to one's job are involved.

4. Researchers have also noted that job satisfaction measures vary in the extent to which they measure feelings about the job or cognitions about the job.


B) DEFINITIONAL ISSUES

1. The concept of job satisfaction has been developed in many ways by many different researchers and practitioners.

2. One of the most widely used definitions in organizational research is that of Locke, who defines job satisfaction as "a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's job or job experiences".

3. Others have defined it as simply how content an individual is with his or her job; whether he or she likes the job or not.

4. It is assessed at both the global level (whether or not the individual is satisfied with the job overall), or at the facet level (whether or not the individual is satisfied with different aspects of the job).

5. Lists 14 common facets:

i. Appreciation
ii. Communication
iii. Co-workers
iv. Fringe benefits
v. Job conditions
vi. Nature of the work
vii. Organization
viii. Personal growth
ix. Policies
x. Procedures
xi. Promotion opportunities
xii. Recognition
xiii. Security
xiv. Supervision


6. A more recent definition of the concept of job satisfaction is who have noted that job satisfaction includes multidimensional psychological responses to an individual's job, and that these personal responses have cognitive (evaluative), affective (or emotional), and behavioural components.

7. Job satisfaction scales vary in the extent to which they assess the affective feelings about the job or the cognitive assessment of the job.

8. Affective job satisfaction is a subjective construct representing an emotional feeling individuals have about their job.

9. Hence, affective job satisfaction for individuals reflects the degree of pleasure or happiness their job in general induces.

10. Cognitive job satisfaction is a more objective and logical evaluation of various facets of a job.

11. Cognitive job satisfaction can be one-dimensional if it comprises evaluation of just one facet of a job, such as pay or maternity leave, or multidimensional if two or more facets of a job are simultaneously evaluated.

12. Cognitive job satisfaction does not assess the degree of pleasure or happiness that arises from specific job facets, but rather gauges the extent to which those job facets are judged by the job holder to be satisfactory in comparison with objectives they themselves set or with other jobs.

13. While cognitive job satisfaction might help to bring about affective job satisfaction, the two constructs are distinct, not necessarily directly related, and have different antecedents and consequences.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. A study title "Analysis of Factors Affecting Job Satisfaction of the Employees in Public and Private Sector.

17. Weightage factor of each such attribute based on exhaustive survey has been calculated.

18. Region, sector and gender wise study of job satisfaction has provided consistent picture with respect to distribution of data set analysed showed that most of the employees in Indian industry are not satisfied with their job except for a few like male in commerce sector and female in education sector.

19. Total job satisfaction level of males is found to be higher than that of woman. Total job satisfaction level in manufacturing sector is found to be very low.



C) JOB CHARACTERISTICS

1. The beginning of interest in employee attitudes.

2. Developed attitude measurement techniques to assess factory worker attitudes.

3. Focused explicitly on job satisfaction that is affected by both the nature of the job and relationships with co-workers and supervisors.

4. Satisfaction is determined by a discrepancy between what one wants in a job and what one has in a job.

5. How much one values a given facet of work (e.g. the degree of autonomy in a position) moderates how satisfied/dissatisfied one becomes when expectations are/aren’t met.

6. When a person values a particular facet of a job, his satisfaction is more greatly impacted both positively (when expectations are met) and negatively (when expectations are not met), compared to one who doesn’t value that facet.

7. To illustrate, if Employee A values autonomy in the workplace and Employee B is indifferent about autonomy, then Employee A would be more satisfied in a position that offers a high degree of autonomy and less satisfied in a position with little or no autonomy compared to Employee B.

8. Widely used as a framework to study how particular job characteristics impact job outcomes, including job satisfaction.

9. The core job characteristics can be combined to form a motivating potential score (MPS) for a job, which can be used as an index of how likely a job is to affect an employee's attitudes and behaviours.

10. Not everyone is equally affected by the MPS of a job.

11. People who are high in growth need strength (the desire for autonomy, challenge and development of new skills on the job) are particularly affected by job characteristics.



D) DISPSITIONAL APPROACH

1. The dispositional approach suggests that individuals vary in their tendency to be satisfied with their jobs, in other words, job satisfaction is to some extent an individual trait.

2. This approach became a notable explanation of job satisfaction in light of evidence that job satisfaction tends to be stable over time and across careers and jobs.

3. Research also indicates that identical twins raised apart have similar levels of job satisfaction.

4. There are four (4) Core Self-evaluations that determine one’s disposition towards job satisfaction:

i. Self-esteem.
ii. General self-efficacy.
iii. Locus of control.
iv. Neurotic-ism.


E) EQUITY

1. Equity Theory shows how a person views fairness in regard to social relationships such as with an employer.

2. A person identifies the amount of input (things gained) from a relationship compared to the output (things given) to produce an input/output ratio.

3. They then compare this ratio to the ratio of other people in deciding whether or not they have an equitable relationship.

4. For example, consider two employees who work the same job and receive the same pay and benefits. If one individual gets a pay raise for doing the same work as the other, then the less benefited individual will become distressed in his workplace. If, on the other hand, both individuals get pay raises and new responsibilities, then the feeling of equity will be maintained.

5. These three (3) types are:

I. Benevolent – Motivation.
II. Equity sensitive – Job Satisfaction.
III. Entitled – Job Performance.


F) DISCREPANCY

1. The concept of discrepancy theory is to explain the ultimate source of anxiety and dejection.
i. Influencing factors
ii. Environmental factors
iii. Communication overload and under load.

2. An individual who has not fulfilled his responsibility feels the sense of anxiety and regret for not performing well.

3. They will also feel dejection due to not being able to achieve their hopes and aspirations.

4. According to this theory, all individuals will learn what their obligations and responsibilities are for a particular function, and if they fail to fulfil those obligations then they are punished.

5. Over time, these duties and obligations consolidate to form an abstracted set of principles, designated as a self-guide.

6. Agitation and anxiety are the main responses when an individual fails to achieve the obligation or responsibility.

7. One of the most important aspects of an individual’s work in a modern organization concerns the management of communication demands that he or she encounters on the job.

8. Demands can be characterized as a communication load, which refers to “the rate and complexity of communication inputs an individual must process in a particular time frame.”

9. Individuals in an organization can experience communication over-load and communication under- load which can affect their level of job satisfaction. Communication overload can occur when “an individual receives too many messages in a short period of time which can result in unprocessed information or when an individual faces more complex messages that are more difficult to process.”

10. Due to this process, “given an individual’s style of work and motivation to complete a task, when more inputs exist than outputs, the individual perceives a condition of overload. In comparison, communication under load can occur when messages or inputs are sent below the individual’s ability to process them.”

11. According to the ideas of communication over-load and under-load, if an individual does not receive enough input on the job or is unsuccessful in processing these inputs, the individual is more likely to become dissatisfied, aggravated, and unhappy with their work which leads to a low level of job satisfaction.


G) INTERNAL COMMUNICATION:

1. Superior-subordinate communication is an important influence on job satisfaction in the workplace.

2. The way in which subordinates perceive a supervisor's behaviour can positively or negatively influence job satisfaction.

3. Communication behaviour such as facial expression, eye contact, vocal expression, and body movement is crucial to the superior-subordinate relationship.

4. Nonverbal messages play a central role in interpersonal interactions with respect to impression formation, deception, attraction, social influence, and emotional.

5. Nonverbal immediacy from the supervisor helps to increase interpersonal involvement with their subordinates impacting job satisfaction.

6. The manner in which supervisors communicate with their subordinates non-verbally may be more important than the verbal content.

7. Individuals who dislike and think negatively about their supervisor are less willing to communicate or have motivation to work whereas individuals who like and think positively of their supervisor are more likely to communicate and are satisfied with their job and work environment.

8. A supervisor who uses nonverbal immediacy, friendliness, and open communication lines is more likely to receive positive feedback and high job satisfaction from a subordinate.

9. Conversely, a supervisor who is antisocial, unfriendly, and unwilling to communicate will naturally receive negative feedback and create low job satisfaction in their subordinates in the workplace.

H) STRATEGIC EMPLOYEE RECOGNITION:

1. Identified a positive outcome between a collegial and flexible work environment and an increase in shareholder value.

2. Suggesting that employee satisfaction is directly related to financial gain.

3. It is possible that successful workers enjoy working at successful companies; however, Human Capital Index (CPI) study claims that effective human resources practices, such as employee recognition programs, lead to positive financial outcomes more often than positive financial outcomes lead to good practices.

4. Employee recognition is not only about gifts and points.

5. It's about changing the corporate culture in order to meet goals and initiatives and most importantly to connect employees to the company's core values and beliefs.

6. Strategic employee recognition is seen as the most important program not only to improve employee retention and motivation but also to positively influence the financial situation.

7. The difference between the traditional approach (gifts and points) and strategic recognition is the ability to serve as a serious business influencer that can advance a company’s strategic objectives in a measurable way. "The vast majority of companies want to be innovative, coming up with new products, business models and better ways of doing things. However, innovation is not so easy to achieve. A CEO cannot just order it, and so it will be. You have to carefully manage an organization so that, over time, innovations will emerge.”



I) INDIVIDUAL FACTORS – EMOTION

1. Mood and emotions at work are related to job satisfaction.

2. 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.

3. Moods are related to overall job satisfaction.

4. Positive and negative emotions were also found to be significantly related to overall job satisfaction.

5. 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.

6. Emotion work (or emotion management) refers to various types of efforts to manage emotional states and displays.

7. Emotion management includes all of the conscious and unconscious efforts to increase, maintain, or decrease one or more components of an emotion.

8. 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.

9. It was found that suppression of unpleasant emotions decreases job satisfaction and the amplification of pleasant emotions increases job satisfaction.

10. The understanding of how emotion regulation relates to job satisfaction concerns two (2) models:

i. Emotional dissonance.

- Emotional dissonance is a state of discrepancy between public displays of emotions and internal experiences of emotions that often follows the process of emotion regulation. Emotional dissonance is associated with high emotional exhaustion, low organizational commitment, and low job satisfaction.

ii. Social interaction model.
- Taking the social interaction perspective, workers’ emotion regulation might beget responses from others during interpersonal encounters that subsequently impact their own job satisfaction. For example: The accumulation of favourable responses to displays of pleasant emotions might positively affect job satisfaction.
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J) OTHER FACTORS

1. Genetics
- Genetic heritability was also suggested for several of the job characteristics measured in the experiment, such as complexity level, motor skill requirements, and physical demands.

2. Personality
- Positive affectivity is related strongly to the personality trait of extraversion. Those high in positive affectivity are more prone to be satisfied in most dimensions of their life, including their job. Differences in affectivity likely impact how individuals will perceive objective job circumstances like pay and working conditions, thus affecting their satisfaction in that job.

3. Psychological Well-Being (PWB)
- PWB) is defined as “the overall effectiveness of an individual’s psychological functioning” as related to primary facets of one’s life: work, family, community, etc.
- There are three defining characteristics of PWB.
- First, it is a phenomenological event, meaning that people are happy when they subjectively believe themselves to be so.
- Second, well-being involves some emotional conditions. Particularly, psychologically well people are more prone to experience positive emotions and less prone to experience negative emotions.
- Third, well-being refers to one's life as a whole. It is a global evaluation.
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4. Measuring
- The majority of job satisfaction measures are self-reports and based on multi-item scales.
- Several measures have been developed over the years, although they vary in terms of how carefully and distinctively they are conceptualized with respect to affective or cognitive job satisfaction.
- They also vary in terms of the extent and rigour of their psychometric validation.
- The Brief Index of Affective Job Satisfaction (BIAJS) is a 4-item, overtly affective as opposed to cognitive, measure of overall affective job satisfaction.
- The BIAJS differs from other job satisfaction measures in being comprehensively validated not just for internal consistency reliability, temporal stability, convergent and criterion-related validities, but also for cross-population invariance by nationality, job level, and job type.

5. Job Descriptive Index (JDI)
- JDI is a specifically cognitive job satisfaction measure.
- It measures one’s satisfaction in five facets: pay, promotions and promotion opportunities, co-workers, supervision, and the work itself.



6. Relationships and practical implications
- 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.
- An important finding for organizations to note is that job satisfaction has a rather tenuous correlation to productivity on the job.
- This is a vital piece of information to researchers and businesses, 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.


7. Absenteeism
- Numerous studies have been done to show the correlation of job satisfaction and absenteeism.
- Following absenteeism measures were evaluated according to absenteeism predictors.


8. Position level
- Absenteeism cannot be predicted by job satisfaction, although other studies have found significant relationships.


MKR