A study on factors influencing job satisfaction of teachers employed in engineering colleges, South India

Job satisfaction may be defined as general attitude towards one's job. Locke (1976) defined job satisfaction as a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's job or job experiences. This becomes crucial when the employee is serving in an educational institution where they deal with young minds, which are considered to be dynamic, enthusiastic, innovative and with a tendency to expect the same from their lecturers. Methodology: The study is Descriptive and the data was collected from April 2016 to June 2016 through a self designed questionnaire administered to the lecturers employed in Engineering colleges, Chennai, Tamil Nadu using Convenience sampling method. Of the 786 samples 570 was usable. Five point Likert scaling was used to determine the job satisfaction level of the respondents. Chi-square was used for comparing the observed and expected frequencies.

The study results clearly indicate that the lecturers employed in Engineering colleges situated in Chennai are highly dissatisfied with their jobs. The factors which are intrinsic to the job and motivated them were recognition, work itself, possibility of growth and the extrinsic factor that acted as a major dissatisfying factor was poor compensation and benefits

The colleges should offer better pay package, improve working conditions, avoid verbal abuse and foster a sense of belongingness among faculty members. This would improve the quality of their institution, job satisfaction and quality of work life of the lecturers. The study suggests ways to improve the level of job satisfaction of the lecturers employed in engineering colleges of Tamil Nadu.