The factors of job satisfaction

The design of a job has been studied and it has been discovered that identifying the various job magnitudes would improve efficiency of organizations and the job satisfaction of employees.  The Job Characteristics Model is a theory by Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham who propose that the psychological states (meaningfulness, responsibly and knowledge) result in work performance, internal motivation, and lower absenteeism and turnover. There are five core job characteristics that in return produce the three psychologic states. Skill variety is when a job requires a variety of different activities, which entails an employee to use a number of different skills.  Task identity is the completion of a job from the beginning to end with a distinct outcome.  Task significance is the measurable impact to which the job has on the lives or work of others.  Autonomy describes the independence to which the employee has the ability to work alone.  Feedback is the clear information about the effectiveness of their job performance.

The presence of these five job characteristics will determine the experience of the three psychological states. As noted above, these psychological sates include meaningfulness of their work (skill variety, task identity and task significance), feelings of responsibility of work outcomes (autonomy) and knowledge of their results (feedback). When a person feels they have meaningfulness in their work they generally feel valuable to the organization.  The feelings of responsibility, which include freedom and autonomy, means the employee will make decisions on how to perform the job, scheduling, and doing the means possible to accomplish the task. When a person has the understanding and knowledge of their work performance it will not only help track their progression to learn from successes but also allows them to learn and grow from their mistakes. Everyone responds differently between the job characteristics and the psychological states. There are different moderators that bridge that gap and they can include growth, pay satisfaction, security, co-worker/manager relationships, knowledge and skills.

The identification of what work factors are related to quitting at work are usually a combination of factors. If we use the job characteristics model as a guide we assume that such things as a person’s feeling of compensation dissatisfaction, burn out, relationships with manager and conflict are rated as low, they would rate their intention to quit as high because they do not feel those psychological states of the job characteristics model as being satisfied. In order