Research on the Factors Affecting the Staff Satisfaction in Private Higher Education in China
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Yang Yanhua , Song Jaehoon 
Published: December 2024

In recent years, China’s private higher education has developed rapidly, with a peak in both quantity and quality, Private higher education is an effecient complement to and an important part of higher education. The rise of private higher education diversifies China’s higher education. It effectively alleviated the contradiction between the demand for advanced talents in China’s economic construction and the shortage of existing higher education. However, private colleges and universities are still in a disadvantaged position compared with public universities in terms of resources, enrollment, teachers, scale, etc. Compared with public universities, the construction of the teaching staff of private colleges and universities is seriously lagging behind which is embodied in that the structure of teaching staff is unreasonable with young teachers as a main part and the academic leaders or backbone teachers very few, and the teaching staff is unstable with a high mobility. Those factors seriously discourage the development of private colleges and universities. Therefore, research on the satisfaction of employees in private universities, finding the unsatisfactory factors that employees have in their work can enable colleges and universities to find appropriate solutions, improve employee satisfaction and avoid the loss of advanced teachers and managers, thus improving teaching and management. This paper takes full-time teachers and management personnel at all levels in four Private Higher Education in Henan province as research objects to conduct in-depth investigation and analysis of employee satisfaction. Through the review of Employee Satisfaction Theory, the theoretical basis cited in this paper is clarified. According to the literature research, the factors affecting employee satisfaction of Private Higher Education grouped into two categories: demographic factors (gender, age, education, university working years, job title and position) and work related factors (the work itself, working environment, remuneration, leadership and management, working atmosphere, working pressure, interpersonal relationships and university management). Based on the influencing factors of employee satisfaction, the hypothesis and research model of this paper are proposed. The research methods employed in this research are literature method and questionnaire survey. The questionnaire is divided into two parts: the first part is about the demographic characteristics; the second part is about the employee satisfaction survey. Altogether 32 questions in 8 dimensions, namely the work itself, working environment, remuneration, leadership management, working atmosphere, working stress, interpersonal relationships and university management; SPSS22.0 was used to analyze the data, and the he results of descriptive statistics, T test, one-way variance, Pearson correlation, multiple linear regression and other analysis results are as follows: (1)The staff satisfaction in Chinese Private Higher Education is at an average level; (2)In the eight first-level dimensions, employees are satisfied with interpersonal relationships, working environment and working atmosphere. Low satisfaction in work itself, leadership management, university management, working pressure and remuneration; In the second dimension, employees are satisfied with the relationship with various groups and the campus environment, and are not satisfied with renumeration, performance appraisal system, learning and development opportunities; (3)There are significant differences in employee satisfaction in education background and years of service; (4)All eight dimensions have a positive correlation with employee satisfaction; (5)Leadership management, working atmosphere, university management and work itself contribute significantly to employee satisfaction.