job satisfaction and how it correlate to the workers performance

job satisfaction and how it correlate to the workers performance

Employee satisfaction promotes a sense of fulfillment, purpose, and productivity among the employees. Factors which influence job satisfaction include workload, compensation, flexibility, teamwork or management. These factors determine the level of satisfaction that employees derive from their jobs. Although job satisfaction primarily concerns the employee, it is also important to the employer. Employers stand to benefit from a satisfied and motivated workforce. Job satisfaction promotes employer-employee relationship establishing an environment for productivity and progress.

Performance evaluation of every organization depends on the organization success. Organization success on the other hand depends on job satisfaction level of workers. The term job satisfaction has ever since been furnished to mean the ability of an employee to be contented with his or her position in the current organization structure he or she works at. Job satisfaction have been frequently attributed to the positive or negative feelings that employees have toward jobs. Research shows that, satisfied workers have an emotional and physical bond with the organization they work for and have pride being a member of the organization. This paves way for the organization to maintain integrity and high motivation for the workers. Several scholars have identified that job satisfaction has a close correlation with organization success. This paper presents scholarly articles related to job satisfaction and how it correlate to the workers performance.

Job satisfaction is a measure of employee’s contentedness with their current jobs. Job satisfaction tends to evaluate whether employees like their jobs by including the nature of the working atmosphere and the type of supervision they undergo. Job satisfaction normally depends on a variety of factors that help classify job satisfaction. In 1976 Locke defined job satisfaction as a positive emotional state that results from an appraisal in an individual’s job. Job satisfaction can be assessed in two ways global level and the facet level. In the global level job satisfaction is normally judged whether an individual is satisfied with his or her job overall.  In facet level job satisfaction is judged whether an individual loves a certain aspect of his or her jobs. Examples of facets are appreciation, communication, coworkers, job conditions, promotion opportunities, recognition and the level of supervision among others (Ulrich & Ulrich, 2010).

From small businesses to big companies, every organization whether its public or private has the duty to understand its organizational performance and all the factors that influence it. For any organization it is important to understand its own performance to make the right choices to remain competitive and to successfully accomplish the organization’s goals. It is believed that employee’s job satisfaction is one of the main variables that significantly impacts the performance of any organization positively. The literature review conducted, seeks to do a deep research and to understand different aspects of the research elaborated by other authors about the two variables, job satisfaction and organizational performance, and how they correlated to each other.

Job satisfaction and employee performance have been the topic of many researchers. Jobs satisfaction is a positive thing in the organization environment which increases chance for success. It can be said to be the backbone of the organization. Existing literature focuses on the relationship between job satisfaction and ultimate employee satisfaction. A satisfied employee would be the perfect brand ambassador for the organization (Judge et al., 2017). Employee input is vital in building a strong brand. Management theorists have recognized that employee satisfaction establishes a strong brand pull which every organization should strive to achieve. If employees are not comfortable with their jobs, it implies that they are worried about the working conditions, cooperation of colleagues or the involvement of supervisors when making essential decisions. Keeping unsatisfied employees is riskier for the employer as they will not meet the set objectives or the expectations of the supervisor (Khamisa et al., 2015). This will lead to them being fired and the organization will incur costs when recruiting new employees.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs looks into the sociology of human needs as well as their motivations. The model is still used by many companies today when managing the needs of their employees. The approach of the model is to focus on what motivates the employees in order to establish ways to motivate them (Kianto, Vanhala, & Heilmann, 2016). Research indicates that it has contributed to significant improvement in employee satisfaction. It becomes an area of interest for both employers and employees.

Employers are concerned with job satisfaction through the input of the employer. A satisfied workforce is more productive which implies that the business owner will earn more profits. Raziq & Maulabakhsh, (2015) workplace environment is a key factor in employee happiness. The employer is responsible for establishing a workplace environment by the nature of goals established. Factors such as work-related stress influence the level of success which is achieved by the employees. A mismatch between job expectations and the actual working environment influences the amount of stress which the managers experience. Therefore, the employer has role play in creating an environment which considers the situation of the employees.

Job satisfaction has been linked with numerous facts. Some of them include pay, job itself, supervision, promotion, working conditions, and workmates. These factors has a close link between work satisfaction and performance. An article by Lim and Teo, suggests that there exist a positive link between experienced professionals and job satisfaction (Judge et al., 2017). Their research was later backed up by Smith who postulated that workers with experience of more than six months endured hire job satisfaction. To conclude on this article, Morgan affirmed that job satisfaction is greatly increased under many years of professionalism.

According to a survey conducted on over 7939 business units in 2006 in 38 countries indicated that profitability, customer satisfaction and staff turnover were contributed by engagement of satisfied staff. Loockwood & Woodruffe conducted a similar research in 2006 and found that satisfied customers tend to be committed and emerge as top performers in the organization (Bakotić, 2016). Motivated employees tend to be kind to customers leading to continuous growth of organization profits.

Alin Hayz (2010) argued that, there exist zero correlation between demographic characteristics like gender, experience, age and level of experience. However, workers job satisfaction exist on the position held by the worker in the organization and access to decision making in the organization. The more the employee is involved in his or her position, his job satisfaction also increases leading to increased organization performance.

Anuar Bin Hassan conducted a survey on companies around Klang Valley. The survey revealed that a positive relationship existed between components of job satisfaction like promotion, supervision, workmates relationships but was exceptional to pay as per job performance (Judge et al., 2017). Also, this survey showed that there was a significant difference existing between job position and performance. The dimensions of job satisfaction like pay, supervision, job itself, promotion, and co-workers contributed to 17.8% of organizational performance as a result of workers being satisfied with their job.

Job satisfaction promotes openness and transparency among the employees. A satisfied employee is motivated by the fact that their needs such as financial, security and an opportunity to actualize their objectives. Employees are in a better position to realign their objectives those of the company. This promotes teamwork across the entire organization. Improved cooperation making key decisions strengthens the employee-employer relationship (Lu, & Gursoy, 2016). When employees feel valued and productive at the organization, they will express their opinions freely instead of avoiding confrontation with management. Employees will be more willing to share innovative ideas more freely. The company can establish goods and services to meet the unique needs of its customers. As a result, the company grows its market base as well as the public image.

The level of job satisfaction varies based on the type of assessment conducted on a job. The assessment can either be affective feelings or cognitive assessment. Affective job satisfaction entails assessing the emotional feeling individuals have regarding their jobs. Affective job satisfaction judges the degree of pleasure that employees or individuals gather from their jobs. Cognitive job satisfaction entails the evaluation of various facets that are in an individual’s job. The advantage of using cognitive job assessment to evaluate job satisfaction is that you can use it in a unidimensional or multidimensional way. Cognitive assessment when it comes to job satisfaction it gauges different facets that influence a person’s job and then objective that people set for themselves upon securing their jobs. Working conditions play a heavy role in determining a person job satisfaction. This is because under hostile working conditions employees are never motivated to do their jobs as they tend to feel unappreciated by their employers (Shepherd & Patzelt, 2018).

A survey was conducted by Latif et al. (2013) to observe the relationship between employee’s job satisfaction and organizational performance. The survey is conducted with a cause-effect perspective—with employee’s satisfaction being the cause and the effect defined as “how the organizational performance fosters”— and it involved 120 individuals from five different organizations that worked in the development sector. The results of the survey allowed to identify that there is a significant impact of job satisfaction on organizational performance in development organizations, and that organizations having satisfied employees were shown to be more productive and have good working environment and reputation.

A research was conducted by Bakotic (2016) to study the link between job satisfaction and organizational performance and tried to determine whether there is an empirically provable relationship between these two variables with a special focus on the determining the strongest direction of this relationship. To accomplish the goal, empirical research was conducted based on 5806 employees surveyed 40 large- and medium-sized Croatian companies. The results of the study showed that the strongest correlation was between job satisfaction and organizational performance over organizational performance and job satisfaction direction, meaning that job satisfaction influences more the organizational performance and that organizational performance has a weak influence on job satisfaction. It was proposed that organizational performance has a weak influence on the job satisfaction of employees since workers keep receiving the same salaries and benefits despite the success of the companies, so the workers do not identify themselves with the company’s success.

The researches (Al-dalahmeh, Masa’deh, Abu Khalaf, & Obeidat, 2018) studied the effect of IT employees’ engagement on organizational performance through the mediating role of job satisfaction in the Jordanian banking sector. The analysis conducted in the investigation was based on 429 valid answers surveys out of 2499 IT bank employees within the IT departments in the Jordanian banking sector. The study concludes that employee engagement significantly affects both job satisfaction and organizational performance. According to the same results, job satisfaction showed a significant and positive effect on organizational performance, and in addition to other studies, it also found that job satisfaction does have a mediating role in existence between IT employee engagement and organizational performance. The study shows that the three variables are correlated and should be all considered when studying and taking measurements to improve organizational performance in the Jordanian bank sector.

In the public organization’s sector, the South African researchers Mafini and Pooe (2013) conducted a survey questionnaire on 272 members of a government department with the purpose to analyze the relationship between employee job satisfaction and organizational performance on a public organization. The main findings of the survey’s analysis were that five employee’s job satisfaction factors named teamwork, ability utilization, creativity, autonomy, and working conditions had a significant and positive impact on the organizational performance, with teamwork being the strongest one. The results allowed to conclude that an increase in any of the five employee job satisfaction factors will increase the organizational performance for public organizations.

A study of the employee’s job satisfaction through a more specific perspective was conducted by Pushpakumari (2008). The author claims that the overall performance of the organization is influenced by the individual job performance of each employee, and when an employee feels satisfaction about the job, his or her individual performance increases, implying that the overall performance of the organization increases, increasing the possibility of success for the organization. The investigation tried to determine the existence of a positive relationship between job satisfaction and performance of the employee and how the experience, age, and sex influence the variable. To accomplish its goal, Pushpakumari (2008) performed a survey to 237 workers on twenty private organizations from five industries related to manufacturing and services in Sri Lanka. Two relevant conclusions from the study were that there was a significant impact of job satisfaction on the performance of the employee and that satisfied employees have a high commitment in contrast to those who are not satisfied by their job, influencing the overall performance of the organization.

Job satisfaction influence on an organization performance

Job satisfaction has a great impact on an organization performance since the more employees feel wanted and recognized they work hard towards improving the organization they work for. Job satisfaction in an organization can be judged by the productivity, profit, employee turnover and customer satisfaction in the organization. Whereby an organization tends to perform excellently when its employees have job satisfaction. Employees tend to act diligently since job satisfaction encourages teamwork amongst employees and their employers on means to help the company grown. In 2003 Evan and Jack conducted a study on the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational performance. They analyzed the earnings per share of an organization with employees who have job satisfaction with those who do. They found out that employee satisfaction has a positive impact on market performance as the financial performance of an organization with job satisfaction is higher than that of the company lacking employee satisfaction. This proves that advanced yields on assets and income per share in an organization are highly attributed to a company having advanced employee satisfaction (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, & Podsakoff, 2018).

In conclusion, job satisfaction in business enterprises has been one of the complex sectors facing managers when managing their workers. For managers to achieve organization success, they have to ensure their workers are satisfied. This is because, a lot of studies have demonstrated that there exist a correlation between job satisfaction and workers performance. Workers who are satisfied with their job have high motivation leading to high performance which increases organizational productivity. Job satisfaction is contributed by factors like job itself, quality pay, positive co-worker relationship, and friendly relationship. When managers provide these factors, workers will be satisfied and motivated to do their job leading to increased organization performance.

Job satisfaction is achievable the working environment is best suited to making employees feel appreciated by their relative authorities. Employers ought to use effective communication means to enhance teamwork among other staff which in turn improves an organizations performance. Also, recognizing one’s employees helps an employer reduce the number of employee turnover. This is because most employees tend to feel important to the organization and the thought of even leaving the organization may never cross their minds. An organization ends up having an edge over its competitors as unity among working mates helps when it comes to formulating decisions that influence the growth of an organization.

The literature review conducted has shown support for the idea that job satisfaction influences organizational performance. The link between job satisfaction and organizational performance has been explored from different perspectives, considering the link between the two variables as direct, or as a mediating one. Different contexts were explored by the authors consulted, from private sectors to public sectors throwing different findings that allow the conclusion that there is a significant and positive relationship between job satisfaction and organizational performance. Although, it must be noted that the existent relationship it does varies from public sector to private, varies from one industry to another, and varies the way the relationship between the two variables can be measured and can be visualized in the working context. The findings allow the claim that job satisfaction should be taken into account in every organization, by understanding it and adapting it to the specific working context in order to try to reach a higher level of organizational performance and by a natural conclusion, a higher level of success.

References

Al-dalahmeh, M. K., Masa’deh, R. K., Abu Khalaf, R. K., & Obeidat, B. K. (2018). The effect of employee engagement on organizational performance via the mediating role of job satisfaction: The case of IT employees in Jordanian banking sector. Modern Applied Science, 12(06), 17–43. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325263799_The_Effect_of_Employee_Engagement_on_Organizational_Performance_Via_the_Mediating_Role_of_Job_Satisfaction_The_Case_of_IT_Employees_in_Jordanian_Banking_Sector

Bakotić, D. (2016). Relationship between job satisfaction and organisational

performance. Economic research-Ekonomska instrazivania, 29(1), 118-130. (Judge et al., 2017)

Judge, T. A., Weiss, H. M., Kammeyer-Mueller, J. D., & Hulin, C. L. (2017). Job attitudes, job satisfaction, and job affect: A century of continuity and of change. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 356.

Khamisa, N., Oldenburg, B., Peltzer, K., & Ilic, D. (2015). Work-related stress, burnout, job satisfaction and general health of nurses. International journal of environmental research and public health, 12(1), 652-666.

Kianto, A., Vanhala, M., & Heilmann, P. (2016). The impact of knowledge management on job satisfaction. Journal of Knowledge Management, 20(4), 621-636.

Lu, A. C. C., & Gursoy, D. (2016). Impact of job burnout on satisfaction and turnover intention: do generational differences matter? Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research, 40(2), 210-235.

Latif, M. S., Ahmad, M., Qasim, M., Mushtaq, M., Ferdoos, A., & Naeem, H. (2013). Impact of employee’s job satisfaction on organizational performance. European Journal of Business and Management, 5(5), 166–171. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cc90/5df58e2b99003d35ca832a4037a87a519bb3.pdf

Mafini, C., & Pooe, D. (2012). The relationship between employee satisfaction and organisational performance: Evidence from a South African government department. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 39(1). Retrieved from doi: 10.4102/sajip. v39i1.1090

Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., & Podsakoff, N. P. (2018). The Oxford handbook of organizational citizenship behavior. New York : Oxford University Press.

Pushpakumari, M. D. (2008). The impact of job satisfaction on job performance: An empirical analysis. In City Forum (Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 89-105). Retrieved from http://wwwbiz.meijo-u.ac.jp/SEBM/ronso/no9_1/08_PUSHPAKUMARI.pdf

Raziq, A., & Maulabakhsh, R. (2015). Impact of working environment on job satisfaction. Procedia Economics and Finance, 23, 717-725.

Shepherd, D. A., & Patzelt, H. (2018). Entrepreneurial Cognition : Exploring the Mindset of Entrepreneurs. Cham : Springer International Publishing.

Ulrich, D., & Ulrich, W. (2010). The why of work : how great leaders build abundant organizations that win. New York : McGraw-Hill.