Does Social Recognition Impact Job satisfaction of Academic Faculty Members of State Universities in Sri Lanka

The purpose of this study was to assess the overall level of job satisfaction of academic faculty members of state universities in Sri Lanka and to examine whether social recognition of these academic members had an impact on their overall job satisfaction. Quantitative method was employed to collect data using a structured questionnaire from academics in fifteen state universities in Sri Lanka. A representative sample based on multi stage stratified random sampling method was selected, where 500 questionnaires were distributed and 423 questionnaires deemed usable for further analysis were identified. In terms of findings, the median and mean values of the overall job satisfaction of academic staff members of Sri Lankan state universities were found to be 3.95 and 3.93 (in a 1-5 Likert scale), respectively, and in addition, the mean value was also found to be significantly higher than the neural value 3. This means that the academic members are generally satisfied with their jobs in the Sri Lankan context. Further, the multiple regression analysis performed to test the research hypothesis on the relationship between social recognition and overall job satisfaction indicated that the factor “social recognition” was a highly significant positive factor affecting the overall faculty job satisfaction in Sri Lanka. These findings are also expected to have significant policy implications. Kew words: Job satisfaction, Social Recognition, State Universities in Sri Lanka JEL Classification: D 23 International Journal of Recent Advances in Organizational Behaviour and Decision Sciences (IJRAOB) An Online International Research Journal (ISSN: 2311-3197) 2015 Vol: 1 Issue 4 541 www.globalbizresearch. org 1. Background of the Study Job satisfaction is a most important factor in the field of human resource management (Majumder, 2012). Job satisfaction results from the employees’ sensitivity of how well their job provides those things they viewed as significant. According to the Kaliski (2007), job satisfaction “is the key ingredient that leads to recognition, income, promotion, and the achievement of other goals that lead to an emotion of fulfillment”. On the other hand, Heslop et al. (2002) explained that job satisfaction “is the difference between what an individual’s expectations, needs or values about the job are, and what the job actually delivers”. Furthermore, Lim (2008) defined job satisfaction “is vital for personal interests and organizational effectiveness”. It should be noted that education is considered as the most important aspect of every one’s life. Especially higher education plays a vital role in the deployment of the country. The quality of a university is the superiority of its faculty members (Amarasena et al., 2015); higher education being the base for nearly all professional careers. For the socio-economic development of a country, higher education plays a significant role. Nowadays the fast pace of changing environment and growing technology has raised concern for countries like Sri Lanka to be more open to changing trends in order to face the challenges of the globalized world. Quality higher education has currently become an essential part in development and success of a country. A lot of countries paying better courtesy to their higher education, bring technological and structural reforms, efficiently utilize their intellectual resources consistently to the needs of higher education are now the leading giants in this globalized world (Nyangau and Josiah, 2014). A country, which has been ready and highly facilitated with quality institutions with talented group of academic staff enriched with creativity, will undoubtedly, be the market leader in innovations. In such institutions, job satisfaction among academic staff members could be considered to be a key element, and thus, its different dimensions merits examination; this is due to satisfaction leads to high productivity and performance of staff members and benefits the organization as well as students (Saleem, 2010). Stewartg (2004) indicates that once the level of job satisfaction increases, both personnel and organizations will achieve their goals and will thus be more successful. There is a growing interest in order to determine its impact on the performance of academics and the level of job satisfaction in higher education, and accordingly various Job satisfaction related studies have been done in developed countries (Duong, 2013). However, the researchers note that only a few studies been done in developing countries like Sri Lanka. Therefore, it is essential to work on such areas that can be developed to increase the efficiency of academic faculty members, and thus of the organizations as well as the students in the country (Saleem, International Journal of Recent Advances in Organizational Behaviour and Decision Sciences (IJRAOB) An Online International Research Journal (ISSN: 2311-3197) 2015 Vol: 1 Issue 4 542 www.globalbizresearch. org 2010). Furthermore, Oshagbemi (2003) explained that employee job satisfaction is an important attribute that organizations desire of their staff. Eyupoglu and Saner (2009) conclude that various reasons exist for studying academic faculty job satisfaction, as research indicated that if low dissatisfaction and job satisfaction exist among the academic faculty members, then the goals of higher education could not be accomplished. Satisfied employees have lower rates of both turnover and absenteeism. Job satisfaction is also significantly linked to employee absenteeism (Hackett and Guion, 1985). Munhurrun et al. (2009) find that job satisfaction should not be ignored, but only a few organizations seriously had considered it. Further, it is noted that most of the research studies in the field of employee satisfaction are on profit-making manufacturing and service organizations; and thus there has been an increasing interest on satisfaction of academics in higher education. Küskü (2003) indicates that the reason for such growing attention is being due to the fact that labor intensively of higher education establishments and their heavy allocations in the budgets for academics; as well as dependence on of their staff for depicting the organization’s effectiveness. Based on the above observations, job satisfaction of the employees in higher education institutions could be considered a very important issue that merits in-depth examination. Having established the importance of job satisfaction, many research studies have indicated that several factors contribute to the job satisfaction among academic staff members that include, work content, work autonomy, development, financial rewards, promotion, supervision, communication, co-workers, workload, etc. (Saane et al., 2003, Roelen et al., 2008). Further, Board (2007) explained that reward, incentives and recognition are the basic factors for motivation of the employees in the organization. Among these factors, one of the main factor identified is the social recognition of academic staff members (Locke, 1976; Josias, 2005; Marks, 2006). Locke (1976) indicates that recognition is one of the most frequently used elements cited as a cause of job satisfaction or dissatisfaction in employees. Apart from these extant studies which recognize social recognition as a key factor in enhancing the job satisfaction of the academicians, theories including Herzberg two factor theory (1959), Aldefer ERG theory (1972), Maslow’s need hierarchy theory (1943, 1954), and recently Vroom’s Valence, Instrumentality and Expectancy Theory (1964) establish a strong relationship between them. However, the authors do not observe sufficient studies performed on the relationship between social recognition and academic job satisfaction particularly in the context of developing countries as Sri Lanka, and observe it as a research gap that needs to be addressed. Accordingly, present research study mainly focuses on social recognition as a significant factor that contributes to the job satisfaction of academic staff International Journal of Recent Advances in Organizational Behaviour and Decision Sciences (IJRAOB) An Online International Research Journal (ISSN: 2311-3197) 2015 Vol: 1 Issue 4 543 www.globalbizresearch. org members in state universities in Sri Lanka. The research objectives based on this premise are discussed below: 1.1 Research Questions and Objectives There are two main research questions addressed in this study; first question is on assessing what is the level of the overall level of job satisfaction, and the second question is on what is the association between social recognition and job satisfaction, of academic faculty members of state universities in Sri Lanka. Accordingly, there are two main objectives of this research study, and the first is to assess degree of the overall level of job satisfaction of the academic faculty members of state universities in the Sri Lankan context. Then, the second research objective is to investigate the impact of social recognition on job satisfaction of academic faculty members of state universities in Sri Lanka. Apart from these main objectives, this study also attempts to examine the impact of selected demographic factors on the level of job satisfaction of academic faculty members of state universities in Sri Lanka. This research paper is structured as follows: Section 2 discusses the literature pertaining to the association between social recognition and job satisfaction and develops the related hypothesis proposed to be tested in this study. Section 3 discusses the methodology in testing this proposed hypothesis and other methodological dimensions of the study. Section 4 presents the data analysis and findings, while the final section provides the related conclusions derived under this study. 2. Literature Review 2.1 Sri Lankan Context In the present Sri Lankan context, there are 15 public universities with approximately 80,000 internal studen