Employee Motivation: The Two Levels Of Job Satisfaction

The business dictionary defines motivation as an Internal and external factor that stimulates desire and energy in people to be continually interested and committed to a job, role or subject, or to make an effort to attain a goal.

According to Baron (1983), motivation is an accumulation of different processes which influence and direct our behavior to achieve some specific goal. An accrual of diverse routes which manipulate and express our activities to attain some particular ambitions (Rizwan et al, 2010). Bartol and Martin (1998) describes motivation as a power that reinforces conduct, gives route to behavior, and triggers the tendency to continue.

Employee Motivation

Employee motivation is one of the policies of managers to increase effectual

This paper focuses on employee motivation as this could highly influence and affect employee job satisfaction.

Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction, according to Boundless Management, is the level of contentment a person feels regarding his or her job. It is based on how one perceives satisfaction as this can also be influenced by a person’s ability to accomplish an assigned task, the condition of communication in an organization and how management treats employees.

There are two levels of Job satisfaction: Affective and cognitive job satisfaction. If a person refers to his or her emotional feeling about his or her job as a whole, this is considered affective job satisfaction. On the other hand, Cognitive job satisfaction is how satisfied employees feel about some aspect of their job, like pay, working schedule or flexible hours and compensation package.

Measuring Employee Job

First is the single global rating which is a response to a question like, “How satisfied are you with your job?”. Staff are supposed to circle a number between 1 and 5 on a scale from “highly dissatisfied” to “highly satisfied”. The next method, the adding up of job facets, is more complicated. It identifies key elements in a job such as the nature of the work, opportunities, relationships with co-workers, present pay, supervision, and promotion.

Important Factors Affecting Employees’ Motivation and Job Satisfaction

There are typically, five factors which can be used to measure and influence job satisfaction (QA Manzoor, 2012)

1. Pay or total compensation: Every employee expects to earn a reasonable salary and compensation package. It is the driving force to maintain and motivate individuals to provide their highest performance level.

2. The work itself (i.e., job specifics such as projects, responsibilities): This is the nature of the job or what actually the person does. If an employee likes what he does, there is a greater chance that effectiveness of the employee is high.

3. Promotion opportunities (i.e., expanded responsibilities, more prestigious title): Employee aims for career growth and advancement. Organization that provides an opportunity for their employees to step up and advance their career level will definitely have high retention rate among