Personality vs Satisfaction

Employee satisfaction has a number of benefits. Employee loyalty is one of its greatest – those that are satisfied are their job are more likely to stay, and thus save the company a great deal of money.

But while loyalty alone provides enough financial incentive to work on satisfaction, employers are also hoping to increase productivity when they improve satisfaction, because there have been many studies that have linked the two together. Yet there are some researchers into organizational psychology that believe the two may not be linked. According to Dr.

Nathan Bowling from Wright State University: “A cause and effect relationship does not exist between job satisfaction and performance” His research argues that employee satisfaction and performance is a classic example of correlation not equaling causation. His belief (one that he states is within his research) indicates that an employee’s personality is linked to both – that high self-esteem, emotional stability, extroversion and other personality characteristics are the true cause of both satisfaction and performance on the job, and that while production and satisfaction may be correlated, the cause has nothing to do with employee satisfaction efforts. There have been others in the past that have echoed these remarks, and indeed there is something risky about the idea you expect greater productivity out of your satisfaction efforts, because the employees that are already working their hardest may not be able to work any harder no matter how satisfied they are.

Employee satisfaction has a number of benefits outside of production that make it worthwhile, so it does not appear Dr. Bowling is implying that one should avoid working on satisfaction. Rather, he simply states that the effect on production is inexistent.

Even though Dr. Bowling says with certainty that the two are not linked, there is ample reason to believe that, in fact, they may be linked more than Dr. Bowling believes.

While it may be dangerous to expect some rapid increase in productivity simply because you improved satisfaction, there are many reasons to believe that satisfaction should have a positive benefit. Not only has research shown otherwise in many different studies, but there are reasons that Bowling does not appear to address within the article that could and should affect productivity. Some of these will be discussed in the next article.