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Summary Using a sample of 267 bank employees, this study traced the paths to the job satisfaction
of employees at the workplace through the quality of life factors of job involvement and
sense of competence. Results indicated that personal, job, and organizational climate
factors influenced the ego investment orjob involvement of people in theirjobs, which in
turn influenced the intrapsychic reward of sense of competence that they experienced,
which then directly influenced employees’job satisfaction. Implications of these findings
for managers are discussed.
Introduction
The quality of work life experienced by employees in organizations has been an area of
investigation by researchers for several years now. Quality of work life has been assessed basically
in terms of the extent of satisfaction that employees experience with various facets of their jobs
such as with the work itself, the work environment, pay and promotion. Apart from being an
index of the quality of work life criterion, job satisfaction is also related to employees’ ego-
involvement in their jobs - i.e. job involvement (see Rabinowitz and Hall, 1977, for a review of
this literature) - and the psychological rewards they experience in feeling that they have had
some impact on, and gained mastery over their work environment - i.e. a sense of competence
(Sekaran and Wagner, 1980). The variables of job involvement, sense of competence, and job
satisfaction are considered to be three of the indices of the quality of work life (Cherns and Davis,
1975; Taylor, 1975). The correlates of job satisfaction have been studied extensively over the past
several decades since job satisfaction has been found to be related to such organizationally
relevant important variables as absenteeism and turnover.
The United States has been witnessing, over the last few years, her slow but steady
transformation from an industrial to a service-oriented society and America’s labor force, today,
is decidedly service-oriented. Over 70 per cent of the private labor force is working to supply
services, and banks have been one of the 10 high-growth service industries (Schewe and Smith,
1983).The vitality of the banking industry and the performance of its employees are important for
the economy of the U.S.as a whole. Strong correlations among the quality of work life factors
and reduced absenteeism and turnover, high goal commitment, and increased performance and
productivity have been established by several researchers (see for instance, Curry, 1986; Futrell
and Parasuraman, 1984; Motowidlo, 1984). This study investigated the paths to the job
satisfaction of bank employees, via the two quality of work life variables -job involvement and
sense of competence - taking into consideration certain other critical factors that employees
interface with in the work place on a daily basis.
While job involvement denotes the extent of an individual’s identification with the job, sense of
competence is described as the intrapsychic reward that individuals experience because of a sense
of mastery they have gained over their environment. The term sense of competence was first
coined by White (1959). White referred to competence as an organism’s capacity to interact
effectively with its environment. White postulated that people have an exploratory motive and a
need for effectance - i.e. a need to interact with and make an impact on the environment. White
stated that the fitness to interact with the environment is slowly attained through prolonged feats
of learning but the effectance motivation wanes when a situation has been explored to the point
that it no longer presents new possibilities to attain efficacy. White compared the need for
effectance to Angyal‘s (1941) definition of life as a ‘process of expansion’. White (1960, 1963)
defined competence as the cumulative result of the whole history of transactions with the
environment, and described sense of competence as the subjective side of one’s actual competence.
Lorsch and Morse (1974) applied the concept of sense of competence to the work setting and,
like White, defined it as the confidence that one feels in one’s own competence. They further
described it as the intrapsychic feelings of reward that individuals experience when they have
successfully explored, interacted with, and mastered their work environment.
The job characteristics, organizational climate, and work ethic variables that are related to job
involvement are also related to sense of competence (see for instance, Lorsch and Morse, 1974;
Sekaran, 1977; Sekaran and Wagner, 1980; Tharenou and Harker, 1983; Wagner, 1976). Jobs
with skill variety, a stress-free work environment, two-way interactive communication, and a
sense of having participated in making work-related decisions, will all have a positive influence on
one’s confidence in one’s own work competence. These independent variables will thus have both
independent and interactive effects on job involvement and sense of competence. All these
variables will be correlated to job satisfaction as well, as explained earlier. The aim of this study
was to establish the causal connections among the variables so that there would be a better
understanding of how one can go about enhancing the quality of work life for employees.
Not being alienated from the job (i.e. being job-involved to some extent at least) is a necessary
precondition for deriving job satisfaction - i.e. satisfaction from the work itself. Likewise,
individuals who feel inept in their job (no sense of competence) are not likely to derive job
satisfaction. It is not lack of job satisfaction that makes them inept, but it is the ineptness that
makes them dissatisfied with the job. Thus, to experience satisfactions at the work place, it is
necessary for individuals to be job-involved and feel a sense of competence at work.
Based on the above rationale, we can theorize that job characteristics, organizational climate
factors, and work ethic will directly influence both job involvement and sense of competence, and
that job satisfaction will be experienced through the two intervening variables -job involvement
and sense of competence. While job involvement and sense of competence will mutually influence
each other, it is sense of competence that will directly lead to job satisfaction, not job involvement.
The reason is that one can get very involved in the job and keep plodding along without
necessarily experiencingjob satisfaction. In other words, for some ‘work is workship’ and they will
continue to invest time and effort on the job. However, if one has success experiences on the job
and derives a sense of psychological success by feeling confident that he or she is making a
significant impact on the work environment and gaining mastery over the job, the individual will
derive satisfaction.
In effect, the theory postulated here is that the job, organizational climate, and work ethic
variables will have a direct influence on both job involvement and sense of competence, and sense
of competence will lead directly to job satisfaction. These relationships schematicallydiagrammed
in Figure 1 were tested in this study.
-l
Job involvement
A
Job satisfaction
pGZGG] >
,f
I-[ 4- sense of competence
pq
[TaJkidanti)yl
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Sample
A sample of 267 employees was drawn from 12 banks from the midwestern parts of the United
States. Care was taken to include large, medium, and small-sized banks in the sample and it was
ensured that there was a fair representation of employees at the clerical, supervisory, and
managerial levels from each bank. Thus, though individuals were not randomly selected, the
sample from each bank was representative of the population of employees in each of the banks.
The mean age of the respondents was 35. About 21 per cent had college degrees, and 83 per cent
were women.
Data collection
Questionnaires were administered by the researcher to groups of 10 to 30 people assembled in the
banks’ conference rooms during regular work hours. It took about 30 to 45 minutes for the
questionnaires to be completed, after which time they were personally collected by the researcher.
Complete confidentialitywas assured to the respondents.
Job satisfaction
The dependent variable of job satisfaction was measured through the Job Descriptive Index
developed by Smith, Kendall and Hulin (1969). This 72-item measure taps the satisfactions
derived from the work itself, supervision, co-workers, pay, and promotion (Cronbach’s alpha =
0.77).
Job involvement
This intervening variable which taps the extent to which employees think of their work as a major
factor in their lives was measured by the six-item short measure developed by Lodahl and Kejner
(1965) (alpha 0.71).
Sense of competence
This second intervening variable which taps the intrapsychic feelings of confidence in one’s own
competence was measured by seven items from Wagner and Morse (1975) (alpha=0.87). The full
scale of 23 items was developed by Wagner and Morse based heavily on White’s writings (1959,
1960, 1963, 1967). The short seven-item measure was used based on Wagner’s recommendation
(personal conversation, 1980).
Job characteristics
Job characteristics included the dimensions of skill variety, autonomy, task identity and task
feedback. These four dimensions described below, were measured through the 17 items in the Job
Characteristics Inventory developed by Sims, Szilagyi, and Keller (1976).
352 U. SEKARAN
Skill variety Skill variety denotes the extent to which the job uses a number of different skills
that the individual possesses (alpha = 0.80).
Autonomy Autonomy taps the extent of freedom, independence, and discretion that the
employee has in scheduling and performing the job (alpha = 0.79).
Task identity This signifies the extent to which an individual performs a ‘whole’ and identifiable
piece of work (alpha = 0.75).
Task feedback This relates to obtaining clear and direct information about how one is
performing even as one is engaged in doing the job (alpha 0.69).
The three OrganizationaIclimate factors were tapped through the following measures:
Communication was measured using five items developed by Price (1972). Cronbach’s
alpha for this measure was 0.85.
Participation in decision-making was tapped through the five items from White and Ruh
(1973). Cronbach’s alpha = 0.88.
Stress was tapped through the nine items from Lyons (1971). Cronbach’s alpha 0.81.
Work ethic was tapped through the 19 items developed by Mirels and Garret (197 1). Work
ethic is a value orientation which exhorts the individual self to restless disciplined work
(Fullerton, 1959). The Cronbach’s alpha for this scale was 0.76.
Data analysis
After testing for the psychometric properties of the measures, path analysis was done to trace the
theorized paths to job satisfaction. Path analysis refers to a type of causal analysis that has much
in common with the simultaneous equation approaches of econometricians. Although most
models involving path analysis have used recursive systems, nothing restricts their application to
one-way causation (Namboodiri, Carter and Blalock, 1975). Path analysis applications usually
presume linear, additive, recursive equations with disturbance terms. A path coefficient may be
The mean and standard deviation on the variables of interest to the study and the intercorrela-
tion matrix are provided in Tables 1 and 2. As can be seen from Table 2, there is no extreme
multicollinearity among the variables (i.e. I X.6). It can be noted that sense of competence and
job satisfaction are significantly correlated to all the variables in the study and job involvement is
correlated to all but feedback from the job itself. Job autonomy and participation in decision-
making are significantly correlated to all the other variables, their correlation to each other being
0.6.
The results of the regression analyses tracing the paths from the independent variables to job
involvement, all nine variables to sense of competence, and all 10 variables to job satisfaction, and
the explained variance at each stage are shown in Table 3. As can be seen, work ethic (path
coefficient = 0.21; p<O.OOl), and the job characteristics of skill variety @ c = 0.16; p<0.05) were
the only two variables that significantly explained the variance in job involvement. For this
sample of bank employees, stress did not decrease their involvement in the job, nor did
communication, participation in decision-making, and the other job characteristics increase their
involvement. This perhaps has some relationship to the set-up in the banks as discussed later.
About 14 per cent of the variance in job involvement was explained by the eight independent
variables.
For sense of competence, apart from job involvement which had a path coefficient of 0.24 (p
<0.001), the personal variable of work ethic @c = 0.1 l), the job characteristics of skill variety and
task identity @c 0.23 and 0.16, respectively), and the organizational climate variables of stress
(pc = -0.15), and communication (pc 0.17), had significant path coefficients. Participation in
decision-making, autonomy on the job, and task feedback did not have significant paths to sense
of competence. One would expect that participation in decision-making and autonomy, in parti-
cular, would enhance sense of competence, and the results are intriguing. It is quite possible that
in the bank setting, participation in decision-making does not amount to much since most of the
policies are already laid down. For the same reason, job autonomy may not imply much freedom
to explore new ways of doing things, which is what would enhance sense of competence. However,
over 49 per cent of the variance in sense of competence was explained by the nine variables.
c
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F
>
Table 2. Correlations among the variables of interest in the study (n = 267) ;d
>
z
Participation
Skill Job Task in decision- Work Job Sense Job
variety autonomy identity Feeback Stress Communication making ethic involvement of competence satisfaction
Skillvariety 1.00
Job autonomy 0.41) I .oo
Task identity 0.24* 0.56* 1.oo
Feedback 0.28* 0.48* 0.48* 1.00
Stress -0.167 -0.19* -0.06 -0.3s 1.00
Communication 0.21* 0.41* 0.30* 0.411 -0.58* 1.00
Participation 0.47* 0.60* 0.40* 0.45* -0.31* 0.46'1 1.oo
in dec. making
Work ethic 0.08 0.15t 0.09 0.07 4.04 0.05 0.14# 1.oo
Job 0.231 0.17t 0.14 0.07 -0.19* 0.19* 0.23* 0.24* 1.00
involvement
Sense of 0.45' 0.43* 0.38, OM* -OM* 0.47* 0.46* 0.23* 0.42* 1.00
competence
Job 0.39* 0.28* 0.W 0.35* -0.43* 0.37* 0.39* 0.llj 0.25* 0.52* 1.oo
satisfaction
*p <0.001.
t p <0.01.
$p <0.05.
PATHS TO THE JOB SATISFACTION OF BANK EMPLOYEES 355
0 24@<00011
rAutonomyl
1IITask identity
ITask
0.16(pC0.01)
i d eIn t i t v y
I 0.18(p<0.01)
-0.24(p<0.001)
Discussion
The purpose of this study was basically to investigate the hypothesized causal connections among
the independent variables, the intervening variables and job satisfaction. The idea was that given
the fact that involvement, sense of competence, and job satisfaction are psychological and atti-
tudinal factors operating in employees at the work setting, we should have a better handle on what
the relationships among these quality of work life variables are. This would help us to enhance
PATHS TO THE JOB SATISFACTION OF BANK EMPLOYEES 357
supervise bank employees can also increase sense of competence by reducing their stress (which
can be experienced from the tediousness of doing routine, boring tasks), and giving them
assignments where they can work from the beginning to the end of an identifiable job (task
identity) instead of working on small parts of a task where they cannot see the final form, shape,
or result of their output (see Table 3).
The findings of this study offer directions for further investigations in this area. Future studies
should be designed longitudinally to measure increases in job involvement, sense of competence,
and job satisfaction over time, and establish the causal connections more scientifically. Empirical
studies should also be designed to establish the relationship between sense of competence and job
performance. If the results of this study and Lorsch and Morse’s (1974) are replicated, the findings
will be useful inasmuch as they will heighten the awareness of managers to the importance of
enhancing psychological success experiences for employees at the work place. This awareness will
be very helpful to managers since creating an environment where employees can experience a
sense of competence would perhaps be much easier, compared to increasing other factors such as
pay and promotional opportunities - both of which are often beyond the control of managers in
organizations. Managers will be desirous of enhancing the sense of competence of employees
when they know that this will increase the job satisfaction and job performance of their
employees.
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