by Professor Tony Wheeler
Assistant Professor of Human Resource Management
Assistant Professor of Human Resource Management
Okay, maybe the title of this entry understates the importance of job satisfaction, but the recently released national job satisfaction report and subsequent media stir over the report overstate and simplify the power of job satisfaction. Or worse.
Before we start, can we agree that the next time you say "A happy worker is a productive worker," lightening will strike me down. I have two young kids and prefer to live to see them into adulthood. Is a happy worker a productive worker? Yes…just the same as a productive worker is a happy worker. What's that, you say?
You heard me right. Employees who feel under-employed (not using their knowledge, skills, and abilities) often report very low job satisfaction. In a state like Rhode Island, where unemployment is near 12% with another 5-10% added on for under-employment, you can see how employees doing work beneath them might feel pretty dissatisfied. The generally lousy economic conditions also make people less satisfied with their jobs, even if they're lucky to have them.
But let's continue to discuss the job satisfaction-performance relationship. Empirically speaking, that relationship has a very weak, almost zero, positive relationship. Job satisfaction explains less than 1% of job performance. That's it (although it does explain quite a bit more turnover). So you are probably more likely to find a very satisfied unproductive employee than you are to find an unsatisfied, unproductive employee. Think about someone who has just experienced a traumatic personal event (parent passes away, spouse loses job, divorce, etc). How productive will that employee be over the next couple of days? Does that have anything to do with their job satisfaction?
Sometimes job satisfaction is a canary in a coal mine. It tells you that something is wrong, but you don't know what's causing the problem. It could be something out of a company's control. Job satisfaction is also capricious. It can change from day to day. How satisfied are you with your job after returning from a wonderful Caribbean vacation? That's why job satisfaction can be much ado about nothing.
Tony, any thoughts on how satisfaction and "engagement" are different? I've seen much research (mostly from Gallup) which indicates that engagement has a clear (positive) correlation to productivity.
ReplyDelete- Chris
I hear two separate but related points in this post:
ReplyDelete1) That any relationship between satisfaction and productivity is one of correlation, not causality. (Which leads to the author's equation of "a happy worker is a productive worker" with "a productive worker is a happy worker".)
2) That no such relationship exists.
Chris, I think the question you raise about the difference between satisfaction and engagement is a good one, and I'm interested in hearing both of your opinions on that distinction. Nonetheless, even if satisfaction and engagement are different things, and engagement is in fact positively correlated with productivity, it still leaves us with no proof -- or even empirical suggestion -- of causality, and the identity summarized in the first point above would still hold true. In other words, which came first, the engagement or the productivity?
-Joe
Chris and Joe:
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments and questions. Let me see if I can tease these out a bit. Job satisfaction is a general work attitude, and like all attitudes, shares a weak relationship with actual behaviors. Job satisfaction can eventually decrease motivation, which in turn can decrease job performance. But this process takes a lot of time, and many other factors impact motivation beyond just satisfaction. As Joe mentioned, there are causality issues with satisfaction and job performance. Yet most managers continue to insist that satisfaction leads to job performance. It simply isn't true.
The issue of engagement is a hot topic. Engagement refers to "a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption" (Schaufeli et al., 2002, p. 74). It's an emotional energy that employees then invest into their jobs. Unlike satisfaction, there seems to be a causal relationship between engagement and performance that creates a reciprocal relationship. Being engaged leads to you to perform better, and the results of your performance (feedback, pride, visibility, etc.) leads to more engagement. It's a positive gain spiral. Not surprisingly, engagement more strongly predicts job performance than satisfaction (engagement predicts closer to 10% of performance). Engagement is also more stable than satisfaction, so you'll see far fewer ups and downs of engagement compared to satisfaction.
Now...satisfaction is a much stronger predictor of turnover than engagement, so, again, satisfaction can tell you something (like that canary in the coal mine).
If you want to get even more in the weeds, we can talk about job embeddedness, which has work and non-work components. Embeddedness is an off the charts predictor of turnover and a decent predictor of performance. Engagement is still a better predictor of performance. Sadly, what no one wants to admit is that the single best predictor of performance is IQ. It's not even close.
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I've seen some discussion around the idea that TOO much intelligence is associated with antisocial behaviors, and is thus negatively correlated with performance. Any thoughts?
ReplyDeleteFrom a managerial perspective, the issue of antisocial or counterproductive work behavior comes down to two issues: culture and accountability. If these negative behaviors occur and are supported by the environment, they will continue to occur.
ReplyDeleteSeveral years ago after the Enron collapse, Malcom Gladwell wrote a piece in the New Yorker saying that smart people, if left alone, will natually do bad things. In reality, Enron had a performance management and incentive system designed to promote and reward risk taking. So that's what they got. A lot of risk taking.
Admittedly, if you're hiring really smart people and encouraging them to behave unethically, they will do so a lot faster and more creatively than employees with lower IQ. That's what IQ is: a congnitive processing capability. Higher IQ people encode, store, and retrieve information faster than lower IQ people.
So on the whole, there isn't any empirical evidence that high IQ people are any more or less likely to engage in these types of behaviors. Now by "antisocial" you could mean introverted, which is what most people think of when they think of "smart" people. Because IQ and extroversion are independent and normally distributed personality characteristics, you are just as likely to find a high IQ extrovert as you are to find a low IQ extrovert.
Thanks for the questions...this is really enjoyable.