Job Satisfaction: An Empirical Study

There is a lot of debate on what influences an employee towards satisfaction at the job. A lot of researchers cite attributions while some reason that it is the organizational culture and other attributes which influences satisfaction. As part of a study to understand these dimensions a study was carried out in Hyderabad where employees from four different sectors ie Marketing industry (N=20), Government (N=18), other sectors (N=4) and IT industry (N=38) were identified and the scale developed by Wood, Chonko and Hunt was used to understand job satisfaction. Most of the results are in consonance with the scale dimensions except those related with pay indicating variation due to geography and other reasons. The results indicate an association between job satisfaction and attributions for the experiences. Dissatisfied workers, more than their satisfied colleagues, tend to employ more external attributions in their causal analysis for low job satisfaction. This confirmed postulations from job models in which dissatisfied workers have a propensity to attribute to workplace and environmental factors as agents of their dissatisfaction. The findings thus have implications for the management policies.