Project Management and Job Satisfaction - Essay Example

Running head: PROJECT MANAGEMENT Project Management Global markets impose new requirements on organizations and employees. Many of them consider new opportunities for self-development, while others are trying to fight with the constantly growing workloads. The current paper provides a brief overview of the job satisfaction topic in literature. The example of a small financial firm is considered. The project explores job satisfaction among 10 financial advisors and develops a job satisfaction conceptual framework. Recommendations are provided to help the organization improve the level of job satisfaction among its financial advisors. Project Management Organization “Y” is a small company with 15 employees working in the financial sector and providing financial services to organizations, businesses, and individual customers. The company was established in 1999 and since then has been gradually expanding its presence in the financial services market. The organization constantly increases the range of available financial services and provides its financial advisors with additional workplace opportunities. The company seeks to increase job satisfaction among its employees and considers job satisfaction as the critical component of its business success. The topic of job satisfaction is not new. In the current system of organization studies, job satisfaction occupies one of the central positions. Job satisfaction is defined as “feelings or affective responses to facets of the situation” (Fichter & Cipolla, 2010). Here, facets of the situation imply the workplace situation and environment in which employees are bound to perform, while feelings and affective responses may vary from the quality of workplace performance to the emotional and cognitive balance that result of the workplace pressures and overloads. The “facets” of job imply intrinsic and extrinsic features of particular jobs and the extent to which they influence the level of job satisfaction across various professions. Statement of the problem Since the end of 2006, the organization adopted a new strategy, aimed to expand its market presence, to change its approaches to brand management, and to attract new customers. The strategy has become the determining feature of the organization’s success, and more and more customers came to develop cooperative relations with the professional financial advisors working for the company. Since that time, however, the company management noticed that financial advisors displayed lower motivation to work and did not always cope with their basic workplace obligations. Work absenteeism rose dramatically, while employee satisfaction with their jobs decreased significantly. Today, despite the successes the firm was able to achieve with the new strategy, the levels of job satisfaction among financial advisors remain increasingly low. Managers are unaware of the factors that lay behind this problem. For this reason, it is essential that the company understands what drives job satisfaction among its employees and what must be done to align job satisfaction with the strategic goals of the organization itself. In light of this information, the basic research question to explore is What Factors Are Responsible for the Decrease of Job Satisfaction in Organization Y? Aims and Objectives The basic aim of this research project is to analyze the factors that lay behind the current decrease in job satisfaction among financial advisors in organization Y, as well as to provide recommendations the organization must follow in order to improve the state of job satisfaction among employees. Objectives: To review the current state of literature, in order to define the concept of job satisfaction and the factors that influence it; To create a conceptual job satisfaction framework; To investigate the factors that decrease job satisfaction among financial advisors in organization Y; To provide recommendations organization Y must follow to improve the state of job satisfaction among its employees. Scope The current study is focused on one organization working in the financial services sector and providing financial services to businesses, organizations, and employees. The organization employs only 15 workers and is thus considered as small business. The research will involve 10 financial advisors working for organization Y. Financial advisors will be asked to participate in a brief survey research, to identify the factors responsible for the decrease in job satisfaction in their organization. Literature Review According to Rothausen, Gonzalez and Griffin (2009), job satisfaction has already become the subject of more than 11,000 studies. Nevertheless, the knowledge of factors responsible for increased or decreased job satisfaction is far from complete. More often than not, researchers seek to investigate one or the few factors that influence job satisfaction in one or two business sectors and do not provide sufficient opportunities to create a full picture of what job satisfaction is and how it works in organizations. Because most of the job satisfaction research was done in the U.S., it is often difficult to apply the research findings to the cultural environments that differ from those in America. Nevertheless, the current state of literature makes it possible to briefly define what job satisfaction is and what factors influence job satisfaction in different industries. Generally, job satisfaction is a complex combination of feelings and “affective responses to various facets of the job situation” (Fichter & Copella, 2010). According to Rothausen, Gonzalez and Griffin (2009), “job satisfaction is an aggregate multidimensional construct, which means that it is an aggregate or algebraic function of interrelated attributes or dimensions, typically called facets. Conceptually, job satisfaction is equivalent to the sum of individual satisfaction ratings with job elements”. In simpler terms, job satisfaction is a compound term which implies that (a) job satisfaction is being influenced by a whole set of dimensions and factors and that (b) understanding the general picture of job satisfaction is impossible without understanding the separate elements, variables, and dimensions of each particular job. Today, researchers in job satisfaction tend to engage in one of the same set of measurements and are reluctant to go beyond the accepted boundaries of the job satisfaction research (Rothausen, Gonzalez & Fichter, 2009). Yet, it is still possible to determine and predict what basic factors can influence the decrease or increase in job satisfaction for various groups of employees. That the determinants of job satisfaction are numerous is difficult to deny. For example, Swafford and Legg (2009) explored the determinants of job satisfaction for radiation therapy specialists and came to conclude that the most important factors of job satisfaction include ability utilization, compensation and institutional support, job characteristics, and personnel. Among these variables, ability utilization seems to produce the most significant influence on job satisfaction among radiation therapy professionals: ability utilization implies that radiation therapy specialists are given sufficient opportunities to utilize their skills and abilities in daily operations and, more importantly, can extend their job performance to teach other employees the basics of radiation therapy (Swafford & Legg, 2009). It should be noted, that organizational learning is fairly regarded as one of the basic predictors of higher job satisfaction in various workplace environments. Thus, not only should professionals be able to teach others but should also have sufficient opportunities to learn from their workplace performance and to participate in a broad range of learning activities within their organizations (Rose, Kumar & Pak, 2009). More importantly, not only the factual participation in learning activities but the potentiality of knowledge does produce significant influence on the state of job satisfaction in employees: as long as the latter perceive that their jobs have a potential to provide them with additional learning opportunities, they will be better satisfied with their jobs and will be more willing to participate in workplace activities and contribute to organizational achievements necessary to obtain available learning opportunities. Learning, however, is not the only factor of job satisfaction in different business sectors. Researchers in organization studies often refer to caseload and work overloads as the critical predictors of motivation and job satisfaction. For example, Otterbach (2010) discusses and evaluates the discrepancy between desirable and actual working hours and the influence of this discrepancy on job satisfaction. Objectively, the discrepancy between desirable and actual working hours is being influenced by a variety of variables, including the rates of unemployment in the economy and in the given industry, average weekly working hours, the levels of GDP per capita, and even income inequality (Ottobach, 2010). Nevertheless, the larger the discrepancy between the desirable and the actual working hours, the more dissatisfied employees become with their jobs, even when such a discrepancy is inevitable and is justified by the need to meet the basic life and workplace objectives (Ottobach, 2010). The number of working hours is integrally linked to workloads and caseloads across different groups of employees. Hutchins et al (2010) refer to the example of speech-language pathologists, the number of which constantly decreases while the number of children in need for their services dramatically increases. Hutchins et al (2010) confirm that high workloads have far-reaching implications for retention and job satisfaction – the more cases each professional takes, the fewer opportunities he (she) has to balance his (her) workplace obligations with other life objectives and activities. As a result of additional workloads, professionals in different sectors experience emotional stresses and lose their interest toward their jobs. Some of them may experience the incongruence between their job perceptions/ expectations and the job reality (Goldman & Tabak, 2010). Others may be stressed by the inequality of work demands and available work resources (McCarthy et al, 2010). Emotional job demands and their relation to job awareness in the workplace may also have their impact on job satisfaction (Chen et al, 2009). Finally, the lack of understanding by professionals of their workplace obligations and functions may result in the ongoing dissatisfaction with job and lead to lower workplace performance; this is particularly the case of financial counselors and advisors (Fichter & Cipolla, 2010). Conceptual Framework Based on the results of the literature review, the conceptual framework for the current research will look as follows: 1. Low compensation 2. Ability utilization 3. Institutional support 4. Education potentiality 5. Workloads Job Satisfaction 6. Role ambiguity 7. Work-life balance 8. Incongruence between job perceptions and job reality 9. Inequality of work demands and resources Methodology Researchers in organization studies choose to apply to qualitative methodology, due to its simplicity and the opportunities which qualitative research provides for exploring the far-reaching implications of various organizational phenomena. This research is not an exception, and the choice of the qualitative methodology is justified by the need to look deeper into and understand financial advisors’ perceptions regarding their jobs and workplace performance. The fact is in that qualitative methods of research are the best choice to those, who seek to investigate organizational behaviors and phenomena through the prism of employee perceptions. Qualitative methodology allows interviewing or surveying employees about what they perceive the most important factors influencing their job performance. Qualitative methods display high degrees of validity and reliability of the primary data and thus make it possible to develop sound conclusions and recommendations for the companies to follow. The current research will involve the use of the survey analysis. 10 financial advisors from one financial services organization will participate in the research. Surveys exemplify a perfect form of the brief and cost-effective analysis of job satisfaction and its factors in the given organization. Because the scope of the current paper covers only one organization, surveys will provide better opportunities to systematize the knowledge of factors that influence job satisfaction in the organization. Each survey will contain 20 questions/ statements. The Likert scale will serve the basis of the survey research. Financial advisors participating in the research will have to agree or disagree with the proposed statements. The survey research will be followed by interviews, to clarify the most confusing results of the survey analysis. Research participants will be given 24 hours to fill out and send back the survey form. The interviews will take place next day and will last from 10 to 15 minutes each. The Internet will be used to send and receive the filled out survey forms. All research participants will have to sign the informed consent form, to ensure that they are aware of the aims and objectives of the study and the anticipated outcomes. The principles of confidentiality will be followed. Data analysis and discussion The data obtained during the survey analysis indicates that financial advisors display similar attitudes toward their workplace obligations and mostly agree on the factors that hinder their job satisfaction in recent years. Based on the results of the data analysis, it is clear that financial advisors have the basic understanding of what factors influence their job satisfaction. As a result, 5 essential elements of job satisfaction deserve special attention. 1. Workloads Financial advisors working for organization Y unanimously agree that they are facing increasing workloads. All 10 financial advisors chose “always” in their response to the workloads statements. In the interviews that followed, some financial advisors recognized that since the development of the new organizational strategy, the number of customer constantly increased. Simultaneously, the number of financial advisors was mostly the same. Some financial advisors confess that because of the workloads, the rates of turnover have increased significantly: no one wants to work additional hours and even nights. 2. Ability utilization Financial advisors recognize that the new organizational strategy limits their ability utilization opportunities. Since the moment the new strategy was accepted, they must concentrate on how they satisfy their customers and do not have any time left for developing and proposing other workplace initiatives. Their self-realization opportunities are limited to the extent which makes their workplace performance boring. Most of the time, they have to fulfill one and the same amount of work and the similar range of functions. 3. Education potentiality Financial advisors working for the firm for more than 4 years state that when applying for a job, they were promised interesting education opportunities which, as a result, influenced their choice of the Organization Y. With the new strategy, the company no longer engages them in training courses and research. Some of them have to renew their knowledge at their own expense. 4. Role ambiguity The new strategy seems to result in the continuous misunderstanding by financial advisors of their role and workplace obligations. Most survey respondents fully agree that they experience a sense of confusion over what they must do and what the organization expects them to do. In the interviews, they say that they lack opportunities to access managers directly and resolve these confusions. For this reason, they cannot fully realize their workplace potential and feel dissatisfied with their workplace achievements. 5. Inequality of work demands and resources Since the new strategy has been adopted, employees in Organization Y feel that they have to do more to meet management and organizational expectations. However, the organization itself does not seem willing to improve their workplace conditions. Not only do financial advisors have to participate in training and education at their own expense, but they often spend additional hours or work at home because one working day is not enough for them to cope with their obligations and workloads. Findings The following conceptual framework presents the findings from the current research in a more systematic form. The most important factors influencing job satisfaction in Organization Y include workloads, ability utilization, education potentiality, role ambiguity, and the inequality of work demands and work resources. It is interesting to note, that the financial advisors participating in the research did not mention low compensation as the factor influencing their job satisfaction. There are two possible reasons for that: (a) either the company for which they work pays them well enough against the amount of obligations they must fulfill; (b) or material rewards do not produce the effects on job satisfaction as meaningful as other non-material factors, e.g. education potentiality. 1. Workloads 2. Ability utilization 3. Education potentiality Job Satisfaction 4. Role ambiguity 5. Inequality of work demands and resources Conclusion Job satisfaction is one of the major problems which modern organizations face in their way to improved performance. Numerous strategies were developed to support organizations in their way to business triumph. Unfortunately, not all strategies result in better job satisfaction among employees. This research explored the factors responsible for lower job satisfaction among financial advisors of organization Y. The major factors contributing to lower job satisfaction included workloads, ability utilization, education potentiality, role ambiguity, and inequality of work demands and resources. The findings confirm the importance of maintaining a reasonable work-life balance, providing employees with sufficient work resources, and giving them a clearer idea of their workplace obligations. Based on these findings, organization Y must follow several recommendations. Recommendations Hutchins et al (2010) discuss the influence of excessive workloads on job satisfaction and offer that organizations hire more employees to reduce the burden of workloads on employees. Organization Y must follow this recommendation and hire more financial advisors, to compensate for the increasing workloads; In their surveys and interviews, financial advisors from organization Y state that they lack self-realization opportunities. Organization Y must give employees better opportunities to express their opinions and views, to contribute to the organizational development, and to develop more effective strategies of working with customers; Chen et al. (2010) suggest that employees must have enough time to participate in various training courses. To raise job satisfaction among financial advisors, organization Y must engage its employees in various training courses. The latter must be provided at the organization’s cost. Finally, Organization Y must pay more attention to the resources it offers to its employees and the resources employees can use to fulfill their workplace obligations. 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Swafford, L.G. & Legg, J.S. (2009). Determinants of job satisfaction among radiation therapy faculty. Journal of Allied Health, 38(3): 163-169. Read More