Psychological Factors in Job Satisfaction

In recent years, researchers have paid increasing attention to "factors" in job satisfaction. The relevance of this topic derives from considering that it can affect labor market behavior in relevant ways influencing productivity, effort, absenteeism, and quits. In this paper, I analyze data from the "Working in Britain, 2000" questionnaire and what I find confirms the effects of the personal condition on job satisfaction, as shown in previous studies. In advance, the analysis I have carried out gives results that are compatible with intuitions coming from studies on psychological incentives: it is important to spread information and to give voice, but it is necessary to choose means perceived as really democratic and credible; pay methods based on material incentives can hit job satisfaction, in particular if they are strictly linked to definite and explicit targets; the presence of a supervisor can be considered as a help, but it must not become a merely control activity organizing work in teams it could be an easily way to introduce informal mechanisms of control and, at the same time, to increase job satisfaction; the aim of favoring job satisfaction in a gift exchange view could be a good explanation for general training implemented by firms.