Determinants of Job Satisfaction in Higher Education Sector: Empirical Insights from Malaysia

Abstract

Job satisfaction is one of the most important topics in the field of management and it has received a noteworthy attention from both scholars as well as business practitioners. This is because employee job satisfaction is the main predictor of organizational success and long term performance. This paper examines the impact of four factors namely employee engagement, employee motivation, work environment, and organizational learning on job satisfaction in higher education sector. The data were collected using a survey instrument from 242 employees of public universities in northern area of Malaysia. The collected data was analysed using SPSS and structural equation modelling. Overall, the findings indicated that employee engagement has significant positive effect on job satisfaction. It was also found that employee motivation has significant positive effect on job satisfaction. Moreover, this study revealed that work environment and organizational learning have significant positive effects on job satisfaction. These results provide useful insights for the management in higher educational institutions and suggest that the selected human resource factors are very important for improving job satisfaction.

Antecedents of Affective Commitment of Human Resource Management Practitioners Attending a Professional Body Convention

“…Employee engagement is how an employee is energized (Shuck & Reio, 2013), absorbed, dedicated, enthusiastic, and shows vigor towards his/her job (Macey & Schneider, 2008).Engaged employees are deeply involved, interested in their work, and they have high levels of job satisfaction (Biswas & Bhatnagar, 2013), where as disengaged employees are disconnected from work rationally, emotionally, and motivationally (Sunny & Joshua, 2014). Studies have shown a positive relationship between employee engagement and job satisfaction (Hanaysha, 2016;Imam & Shafique,2014;Kamalanabhan, Prakash Sai & Mayuri, 2009).The present study hypothesizes the following: H3: A positive relationship exists between employee engagement and job satisfaction.…”

Structural Equation Models on the Satisfaction and Motivation for Retirement of Spanish University Professors

“…The teaching work satisfaction-and its motivation-not only depends on salary conditions (Machado et al 2011). The work environment has an equal impact on it (Hanaysha 2016), with everything related to the students being the main source of motivation and demotivation, as Kızıltepe (2008) defines as the vocational factor of teaching. In fact, the lack of social relationships with the students is one of the reasons why the professors wish to return to the teaching activity (Souto Santos et al 2016).…”

Influence of engagement, work-environment, motivation, organizational learning, and supportive culture on job satisfaction.

“…In addition, a study conducted by Hanaysha (2016) also found that organizational learning has significantly affect job satisfaction. Thus, organizational learning signifies the capability of an organization in increasing the skills and knowledge of its workers to safeguard better productivity and efficiency at workplace.…”

“…Moreover, the attention given towards researching job satisfaction has shown the importance of this topic. Thus, to be successful, organizations need to make sure that the workers are satisfied with their jobs (Hanaysha, 2016). As discussed above, job satisfaction is an important factor applied to evaluate organizational effectiveness (Khan, Anjam, Faiz & Khan, 2020).…”

“…Basically, job satisfaction has been studied in the recent years and the past few decades (Tahir, Hussein & Rahim 2020;Zahari, Salleh, Azlan, Baharuddin, Baniamin 2020;Hanaysha, 2016;Castaneda & Scanlan, 2014;Mavridis, 2014). In general, job satisfaction can be described as the opinion of individual towards their work and job experience (Laschinger, Zhu, & Read, 2016).…”