The effects of work values and job characteristics on job satisfaction

Several approaches relate job satisfaction to work values and job characteristics. Quinn & Mangione (1973) used work values to weight domain-specific satisfaction ratings to find out that importance weighting rather reduces the explanatory power of domain-specific satisfaction ratings with regard to some outcome variables, such as overall job satisfaction. Kalleberg (1977) analyzed the effect of both types of variables in their own right. Using US data he concluded that while job characteristics had strong positive relationships with overall job satisfaction, the effect of work values was negative. Borg (1991) found that work values and the evaluation of job characteristics were not independent from each other. Coping strategies can account for linear or v-shaped relationships for different aspects. The present paper replicates selected analyses of previous studies using the International Social Survey Program 1997 study on ‘Work Orientations’, which includes similar indicators. The study is based on representative samples of fulltime employed respondents in a broad variety of national contexts. Work values, job characteristics and satisfaction There are several approaches which relate job satisfaction to work values (i.e., what is regarded as important in a job) and job characteristics or ‘rewards’ (i.e., what people perceive they actually get from their jobs) and the interaction of both. The main difference between these approaches is how the relationship between the three variable sets is conceived theoretically. One line of reasoning holds that the effect of a specific job characteristic on satisfaction should depend on its importance for the individual. Thus, if someone does not value, say, income, the fact that a job provides a high income should not have a high impact on satisfaction. A second line of reasoning would rather come to the opposite conclusion: the higher the importance given to a job characteristic the lower the satisfaction which should tend to result (at least for a given level of rewards). Moreover, the relationship between work values and job characteristics is far from clear, e.g. whether ZUMA-Nachrichten Spezial Band 10, Beyond the Horizon of Measurement 176 work values are an entirely independent factor or whether they are, at least to some degree, a function of job characteristics. A minor distinction regards the selection of measurement devices, in particular for job characteristics, and how these are labeled. Some researchers measure them by asking respondents explicitely how satisfied they are with a given aspect (e.g. income), while others use – in the semantical sense – purely ‘descriptive’ qualifiers (e.g. ‘my income is high’) or rather evaluative qualifiers without referring to satisfaction (e.g. ‘my income is good’). In the following, we will refer to job characteristics and domain-specific satisfaction ratings. We will briefly sketch the work of several scholars which exemplify the different approaches. Quinn & Mangione (1973) used importance ratings (‘work values’) to weight domain-specific satisfaction ratings (such as ‘the pay is good’). They found that importance weighting rather reduces the explanatory power of domain-specific satisfaction ratings with regard to some outcome variables, such as overall job satisfaction. The authors compared the correlations of these outcome variables with a variety of predictors based partly on job characteristics alone and partly on using work values as weights. Even the simple mean of job characteristics showed higher correlations with the outcome variables than the more sophisticated measures employing weighting by the importance ratings. They concluded that, while weighting by work values is theoretically sound because the importance workers attach to job characteristics should modulate their effect, this does not show empirically, because “the average worker apparently is one step ahead of the model builders. He is often unobliging enough to engage in his own weighting procedures before he provides what the researcher presumes to be ‘pure’ satisfaction ratings” (Quinn & Mangione 1973: 20). According to these authors, job characteristics without importance weighting are better predictors of overall job satisfaction. Kalleberg (1977) developed a different approach for dealing with similar indicators: he analyzed the effect of both types of variables, job characteristics and work values, in their own right. Using US data, he found that while the former had strong positive relationships with overall job satisfaction, the effect of work values was negative, i.e., given what workers have attained in their jobs (the ‘job characteristics’), the more importance was attributed to job aspects (the ‘work values’) the lower was overall job satisfaction. Kalleberg explained the negative coefficients of work values as follows: “For a given level of rewards (i.e., holding rewards constant), the more one values those rewards the more likely it is that these values are not fulfilled” (Kalleberg 1977: 133). Moreover, he tested interaction models, with the main effect of job characteristics included together with an interaction effect between job characteristics and work values. The interaction terms were found to be negative which is not compatible with the assumption of Quinn & Mangione that the effects of job characteristics increase with the value attached to them. As a remark of caution he added: “The possibility remains very plausible that values (.) interact with the Braun/Baumgärtner: The Effects of Work Values and Job Characteristics on Job Satisfaction 177 ‘objective’ job characteristics to produce evaluative judgments about those characteristics. For example, individuals are likely to develop judgments about or even to merely notice characteristics of their jobs to the extent to which the individuals value these characteristics. Under these conditions, the job-reward measures already represent the interactions between the true job characteristic scores and values” (Kalleberg 1977: 134f). The potential lack of independence between work values and the perception/evaluation of job characteristics was analyzed by Borg (1991). Unlike Kalleberg, who assumed that the perception of job rewards changed as a function of work values, he rather found the opposite relationship: work values differing as a function of the perception of job characteristics. In the literature, Borg encountered contradicting assumptions on the relationship between work values and domain-specific job satisfaction: on the one hand, that both are positively correlated because people whose work is not satisfactory for a given aspect downgrade this aspect. On the other hand, that there is a v-curved relationship with highest importance ratings both for those who are satisfied with a given job characteristic to a particularly high and a particularly low degree. Previous studies partly supported the former and partly the latter hypotheses, probably due to the fact that sample sizes were usually small and the groups studied were highly selective. Borg provided evidence that both theories hold depending mainly on the perceived controllability of a given job aspect. When someone is dissatisfied with a certain job aspect but feels at the same time that he/she is not capable of actually changing it ‘in the real world’, he/she would, as a consequence, rather solve it in the ‘mental world’. In other words, one would, e.g., devalue this aspect or adjust one’s personal standard in order to cope with dissatisfaction. The more these intrapsychic reactions are triggered, the more predominates a linear rather than a v-shaped trend. As found by Borg, the importance ratings of the organization itself show a more linear trend than, e.g., pay and promotion. The work done by Borg raises the question in which way non-linear relationships between work values and job characteristics might affect overall job satisfaction. Partly independent of this aspect, the previous studies did not address the question for which kinds of workers, defined by the work values they hold, the obtained results apply. As is known, there are only very few workers who do not think work values are important, at least to some degree. Yet, both the Quinn & Mangione and the Kalleberg analyses are based on sample sizes of little more than 1,500 cases. The American part of the survey we are going to analyze here includes, with half the sample size of those studies, only 2 and 6 respondents who think an interesting job is ‘not important at all’ and ‘not important’, respectively. This suggests that the results of the analyses of the previous studies are practically restricted to respondents who value job rewards. While Borg tested his hypotheses on a much larger database (7,369), it consisted mainly of organizational surveys in the electronics industry in Europe. ZUMA-Nachrichten Spezial Band 10, Beyond the Horizon of Measurement 178 In order to include workers with low work values, a sufficiently large sample size is needed. However, irrespective of the sample size, there will be still much more workers who value a job characteristic to a high degree. As regression results are sensitive to the number of cases, we will use this method only at a preliminary stage of analysis, and switch to a visual representation of the data thereafter. This is also useful as regards the possible non-linear relationships.