The Importance of Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction is a key factor that leads to success in the world of corporations. Job satisfaction is defined as, “the extent to which people like or dislike their jobs”. It can influence a company at the individual level, the group level and even to the point of impacting a corporation as a whole. Employee contentment can also affect a company on the economic level. Job satisfaction influences nearly every aspect of a corporation. Therefore, understanding job satisfaction is important to the success of a company. It is important to be aware of what job satisfaction really is, the positive effects of job satisfaction, and the negative effects of job dissatisfaction. The more that you become familiarized with an understanding of job satisfaction the more you will understand the importance of it and all of the possibilities that having a happy work place could provide. First, with jobs satisfaction being important to success within an organization, it is important to understand the studies done on this topic. Through Wikipedia I found that there are actual four models for job satisfaction and they are: the affect theory, dispositional theory, two-factor theory, and job characteristics model. With the vast amount of research, it is understandable that many theories have been developed to help explain and understand the many facets of job satisfaction. One finding that may be surprising is that pay is not a major factor in job satisfaction. The factors that have a greater impact include physical conditions in the workplace, coworkers, and flexibility of work hours. Also there is a study that was done that was the original study of job satisfaction and it is known as the Hawthorne study. , The first theory that will be discussed is the Affect Theory. The Affect Theory was created by Edwin A. Locke and is the most famous job satisfaction model. This study explains that job satisfaction is determined by the difference between what someone wants in

Links: Work-Life Programs to Employee Performance”. Also, the employees attitudes about their work place could also determine how well of a salesman they are. It could effect how much the consumer buys and whether the consumer even buys from them at all. This just continues to show how important job satisfaction really is. The final aspect of job satisfaction, which sums up everything else is profitability. Ultimately, companies exist to be profitable and are sustained and grow because of their profitability. In contrast, a company that is not profitable will ultimately fail. Therefore, profitability could be looked at as almost the heart of the business, it is what keeps it alive or if it is not there kills it. With profitability being so important it would make since to do all that you could to ensure that you company apply the right tools to have optimal levels of profitability. Since job satisfaction is one of the drivers behind profitability then it would clearly make since for managers in all fields to try to ensure that they have a happy environment for their employees. The manager should focus on having a company with a happy environment leads to greater job satisfaction among its employees. It can be very expensive to be able to provide a work place that is best suitable to have happy employees. Although it is costly, it should be looked at as an investment. This investment leads to both higher levels of productivity and customer satisfaction. If someone were to come to you and say that they have a plan that would increase profitability, then you would like to hear what they had to say no matter how crazy it might sound. This is one of the things that could fall into that category. So it would be smart to invest in job satisfaction because it leads to higher revues. The benefits of investing in job satisfaction would outweigh the cost that would be needed to raise job satisfaction. This is why over 40% of companies that are on the list of being the best places to work also appear on Forbes list of Fortune 500 companies. Like this, companies which are thought of by their own employees to be good companies in which to work, also have been shown to be more profitable. Another point to consider is that since jobs satisfaction is important to success within an organization, it is important to understand the negative affects of job dissatisfaction. As job satisfaction had positive effects on an organization, the opposite is also found to be true. All of the inverses of the positive effects are true: job dissatisfaction leads to less productivity, having less satisfied and unhappy costumers, and ultimately losing money that could have been made if the employees were more satisfied with their jobs. In addition, job dissatisfaction has also been proved to lead to higher rates of absenteeism, health problems, and employees leaving the company. At first we looked at the pros of having satisfied employees and now we will continue with a different approach and look at the negative effects of not having employees that are satisfied with their work place. Job dissatisfaction leads to higher rates of absenteeism. In a study done by Caren B. Goldberg and David A. Waldman, it was determined that there is a relationship to job dissatisfaction and absenteeism. An employee who lacks contentment lacks motivation and is likely to find reasons not to attend work regularly. When employees lack job satisfaction, there will be higher rates of absenteeism. One of my friends told me once that he called in sick today, even though he was actually okay and just wanting to watch a ball game on the tv. He said he didn’t mind because he would much rather not go to that ‘hell-hole’. So I asked him if he really meant that or if he was just kidding around. He responded by telling me that he really hated his job, so any time he could get out of it he would take the opportunity. That just goes to show that people who are not satisfied with their job are more likely to skip out on it. Another problem of job dissatisfaction, which is similar to absenteeism is employees going to work but wasting time but still getting paid to be there. Common examples of this are people going to websites like Facebook or Twitter, or using work time to make personal calls. Another problem, which is more commonly only found for male employees, is that they use company time to go to pornographic websites or online gambling games. With pornographic websites, their busiest time of the day is mid-afternoon, the same time that most people should be getting paid to work, not getting paid to look at porn. The problem here though is that these people were not satisfied with their job or where they were at in their carreer, and had almost given up, so therefore they are now waste the company’s time and money. Job dissatisfaction can even lead to health problems. E. B. Faragher, M Cass, and C. L. Cooper did a meta-analysis study that helped prove this to be true. They did a study on a combined 267,995 individuals to try to link job satisfaction to both mental and physical health. Job dissatisfaction was most strongly associated with mental/ psychological health. They found that as a result of job dissatisfaction, patients suffered from burnout, low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. The result of physical illness was also found, but was not nearly as high as that of mental/ psychological illness. This can also cause a business to fail because the employees that are not healthy will also not be as productive. If an employee is depressed or has some other sort of mental or physical problem then it will make that employee less efficient that that of a normal healthy employee. This goes to show that in the same scenario job dissatisfaction had a trickling effect, in that the job dissatisfaction lead to both unhealthiness and inefficiency, which together both lead to a less profitable business. Job dissatisfaction can also lead to people leaving the company. Over a period of time, if contentment is not attained, there is an increased likelihood of employees leaving the company. Normally, when this point as reached, money or other provisions will not impact the decision or cause the employee to want to stay longer. This is due to the fact that more money and higher position can only work for the short run, and only work so long. There is a point where the person either gets fed up or burned out to where then he or she leaves the company. Losing trained employees is very costly for companies. For employees to be replaced, there are cost in recruiting new employees, interviewing new employees, and training these new employees to do the same job as the last employee who left because of job dissatisfaction. All at the same time, providing your competition with a good trained employee that they can now hire. Also, in many cases, the new employee lacks the experience of the lost employee. Some estimates say it is ten times cheaper to hire a new employee than it is to keep an old one. In summary, job satisfaction is very important, and companies should make effort to ensure they have happy employees. Contented employees will be more productive and will have cyclical effects impacting many other aspects including other employees, customers, business costs, and will ultimately lead to greater overall corporate profits. The main point is that companies should invest in their work place and employees because it will make the company more profitable on every level. If companies were to take job satisfaction as seriously as they should then it would lead to they companies being much being able to also beat their competition on many levels, from sales on to the efficiency of how their product is made. So, if I were a manager of any company, whether it be big or small, I would try to implement a plan to have one of the top rates of job satisfaction for my employees, because it would in turn make my company or branch more and more profitable.