Age and Job Satisfaction among Public Secondary School Teachers in Nakuru County, Kenya

Abstract

IntroductionJob satisfaction and motivation are very crucial to the long-term growth of any educational system around the world. As Ololube (2006) points out, job satisfaction is important in the same way as professional knowledge, teaching skills, and access to educational resources. This, as Patrick ( 2007) points out, is due to the strong link between job satisfaction and academic achievement of students. A satisfied teacher has a friendly attitude and greater enthusiasm which contributes immensely towards the educational advancement of the students, whereas a dissatisfied teacher has an irritable and hostile attitude thereby causing great harm to the institution as well as to the society (Sankar&Vasudha, 2015). A study carried out by Akomolafe, Ogunmakin and Fasooto (2014) in Nigeria emphasized that the consequences of job dissatisfaction among teachers are absenteeism from schools, high turnover, aggressive behaviour towards colleagues and learners, early exit from the teaching profession and psychological withdrawal from work. Otto and Arnold (2005) have linked teacher turn over or the motivation to leave the teaching profession to dissatisfaction with various aspects of their job. A higher turnover leads to teacher shortfall, and consequently high student-teacher ratio whose deleterious effect on students' learning gains cannot be overstated.Job satisfaction of teachers is a function of an individual's needs fulfilment since teachers are not similar in terms of temperament, interests, and experience. Therefore, their needs and consequently levels of job satisfaction may differ (Steers, Porter &Bigley, 1996). In view of teachers' heterogeneity, Evans (1998) has averred that the best approach in an attempt to study teacher satisfaction is to adopt the individuality dimension, where the focus is on individual characteristics such as age. Research on the age-job satisfaction relationship has yielded mixed results. For instance, Crossman and Harris ( 2006) identified significant differences in job satisfaction among teachers in different age groups,

The relationship between Technostress levels and job satisfaction of Teachers within the COVID-19 period

“…Several studies obtained related results, indicating that female teachers’ job satisfaction levels were higher than male teachers’ (Shaukat et al, 2019 ; Toropova et al, 2021 ). However, in some studies, gender was not effective on teachers’ job satisfaction levels (Crossman and Harris, 2006 ; Shrestha, 2019 ; Singh and Kumar, 2016 ), while in some others, contrarily to our research findings, male teachers had higher job satisfaction levels (Chitra, 2020 ; Maina et al, 2021 ). The research results indicated that private school teachers’ job satisfaction levels were lower than public-school teachers’.…”