The Impact of Email Usage on Job Satisfaction

ABSTRACTCommunication through email is becoming common at workplace. It affects employees' attitudes positively or negatively. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the relationship between communication through email and employees' job satisfaction. The sample has been chosen from the ministry of education in Oman as it adopted a new policy which is using email for communication among all employees instead of paper based documents. PLS based SEM has been used to analyze the data and the results revealed a significant positive relationship between email usage and employees' job satisfaction. Limitations and implications of the study have been discussed.Keywords: Communication, Email, Job Satisfaction, PLS based SEMINTRODUCTION:Spector (1997) considers job satisfaction as an individual's attitude towards one's job and he is more likely to achieve organization goals if he has a positive attitude. Employees' job satisfaction is a very important factor in increasing job performance (Temguliene, 2012; Hira, 2012; Judge et al., 2001), productivity (Bataineh, 2011), and reducing employees' turnover (Mobley, 1977). Miller (2007) insisted that job satisfaction correlates negatively with employees' intention to leave. Weikel-Morrison (2002) also confirms the importance of job satisfaction in employees' retention. Wu (2011) stated that organizations can compete globally through job satisfaction as it increases the retention of employees. Malhotra and Mukherjee (2004) argued that job satisfaction affects significantly the service quality delivered to employees. Therefore investigating factors that leads to job satisfaction is valuable.Recently ministry of education in Sultanate of Oman integrates usage of email as a way of communication among the ministry employees and stops using paper -based documents. Therefore, use of email becomes inevitable. Every employee has an organization email account. All services are submitted electronically and yet there is no empirical evidence that examined the impact of email usage at the workplace and its influence on employees' job satisfaction. Therefore, this study aims to find out if communication through email would increase employees' job satisfaction.LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES DEVELOPMENT:Employees' job satisfaction is a cornerstone for achieving a satisfactory level of organizational management (Velickovic et al., 2014). Pan (2015) argued that employees' job satisfaction increases their organizational citizenship behavior and leads to high ratio of revenue per employee. Therefore, he conducted a study to explore the most important factors that raise employees' job satisfaction in an international tourist hotel. Analysis of 474 employees' responses revealed that compensation is the most important factor, followed by work environment, interpersonal relationship, and supervision. Wright and Bonett (2007) investigated 112 managers from an organization located on the west coast of the United States to find out that job satisfaction has a significant negative path with employees' turnover and employees' well-being weakens the relationship. Yoo and Han (2013) surveyed 226 employees from a food service firm in South Korea and found that employees' attitudes affect their uses of E-learning at the workplace. Therefore, it seems that there is a mutual relationship between communication mean and employees' job satisfaction.There are many studies provided evidence for the importance of communication in organizations. Wrench (2013) states that "Communication in organizations is as important as breathing is to human. Organizations have many stakeholders (an individual or group that has an interest in the organization), and each different set of stakeholders require different communication strategies. Ultimately, communication is one of the most basic functions of any organization". Communication is considered a key element in reducing uncertainty, ambiguity, and promoting discussion and building self -esteem (Rajesh & Suganthi, 2013). …