Job Satisfaction among Doctors and Nurses

Job Satisfaction among Doctors and Nurses.

Abstract

For almost one hundred years, employee job satisfaction has been targeted by research. The origin of these studies dates back to at least 1911, when Taylor began to study employees and their duties to develop better ways to train workers.

Several years later, the interest in job satisfaction had clearly arrived when Edward Thorndike examined the link between work and satisfaction in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 1918.

Some experts in the field suggest that the study of job satisfaction can be traced back almost 200 years, when the industrial revolution had begun to blossom in the United States.

However, these initial studies were focused on maximizing worker productivity and the data was often muddled with vague constructs such as “morale” which provided little conceptual clarity and results that were marginally useful.

By 1927, the study of employee’s positive or negative reaction to their jobs had fully begun to take hold when Elton Mayo first studied the effect of lighting at the Western Electric Hawthorne work in Chicago².

These studies showed that lighting had little connection to worker productivity, creating the fundamental groundwork for further studies that asked about other factors that may have an impact on employees.

Introduction

Background Of Study

The Hawthorne studies continued until 1932, and in the five year interval, the research widened to include factors such as temperature, fatigue, breaks and working hours.

Mayo’s work may seem marginally relevant to job satisfaction today, but he discovered that the mere act of studying workers and providing them with more attention increased their motivation and productivity.

Mayo had stumbled upon the essence of human motivation, marking a new era of humanistic job satisfaction and revolutionizing the research and theories of job satisfaction.

Job satisfaction studies continue to emerge and the results are often valued for both humanistic and financial benefits.

When employees are satisfied, they tend to care more about the quality of their work, they are more committed to the organization, they have higher retention rates and they are generally more productive³.

Spector suggest that job satisfaction data is helpful in evaluating the emotional wellness and mental fitness of employees and that organizations can use the information to improve departmental policies and practices where dissatisfaction is experienced⁴.

References