An Investigation of National Trends in Job Satisfaction in Britain and Germany
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2005.00362.x |
| Published date | 01 September 2005 |
| Date | 01 September 2005 |
| Author | Nicholas Tsitsianis,Francis Green |
British Journal of Industrial Relations
43:3 September 2005 0007– 1080 pp. 401– 429
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
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Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UKBJIRBritish Journal of Industrial Relations0007-1080Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2005September 2005433401429
Symposium on the Quality of Work Life
Trends in Job Satisfaction in Britain and GermanyBritish Journal of Industrial Relations
Francis Green and Nicholas Tsitsianis are at the Department of Economics, University of Kent.
An Investigation of National Trends in Job
Satisfaction in Britain and Germany
Francis Green and Nicholas Tsitsianis
Abstract
Trends in job satisfaction in Britain and Germany are described, and potential
explanations investigated. Contrary to what might be expected from popular
commentary, changing job insecurity does not explain the fall in job satisfaction
in either country. It is found that intensification of work effort and declining
task discretion account for the fall in job satisfaction in Britain. In Germany
there was a modest fall in the proportion of people working the number of hours
that they wanted to. However, while working too many or too few hours is a
significant source of job dissatisfaction, the changes were too small to account
for the fall in job satisfaction.
1. Introduction
In this article we pursue an inquiry into potential explanations for recent
declines in overall job satisfaction in two countries for which a substantial
run of data is available, namely Britain and Germany. Historically, the con-
cept of job satisfaction has been developed theoretically and empirically
within sociology and industrial psychology (e.g. Blauner 1964; Herzberg
et al.
1957) as well as within the field of organizational behaviour (Spector 1997).
Following Hamermesh (1977, 2001) the concept has become recognized as
relevant also to economics (Bryson
et al.
2004; Clark 1997; Clark and Oswald
1996; Sloane and Bender 1998). Little attention has been paid, however, to
recent revelations emerging from consistent series of nationally representative
survey data (Blanchflower and Oswald 1999; Oswald and Gardner 2002).
Prior to the 1980s, job satisfaction data showed little or no trend. However,
since the mid 1980s a selection of new repeat survey series and longitudinal
panel data has shown a selective picture of change in job satisfaction in some
countries (Hamermesh 2001; Jürges 2003).
402
British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2005.
National falls in job satisfaction are of interest, on the one hand, because
of the presumption of a coterie of economists that job satisfaction is an
empirical proxy for workers’ utility, hence also their well-being (examples are:
Blanchflower and Oswald 1999; Clark 1997, 2001; Clark and Oswald 1996;
Frey and Stutzer 2002a,b). Although others (e.g. Hamermesh 2001; Levy-
Garboua and Montmarquette 2004) raise plausible doubts as to the validity
of treating the level of job satisfaction as a proxy for the level of workers’
well-being, we argue in Section 2 that the trend in job satisfaction can, under
certain assumptions, be informative about
changes
in workers’ well-being.
On the other hand, it is also of interest to be able to explain the sources of
changes in job satisfaction. Any decline within a modern European nation
might be regarded as surprising for an affluent economy with rising real
wages. The resolution to this paradox might reside in changing aspects of
jobs, whose effect on job satisfaction could have outweighed any beneficial
effects of rising wages. It is widely appreciated that recent decades have
witnessed two related major structural changes in the industrialized econo-
mies: the intensification of global competition, including the emergence of
significant competitors in manufacturing industries from low-wage econo-
mies, and the pervasive diffusion throughout all sectors of computer-based
technologies. These processes — accompanied by incremental or radical alter-
ations in work organization and reinforced by superstructural changes in state
policies — are thought to have had important consequences for labour mar-
kets and for pay and working conditions.
1
At their door is laid the increasing
inequality of pay found to varying degrees in many countries since the late
1970s (Katz and Autor 1999). Hamermesh (2001) has investigated the impact
of rapidly widening pay inequality on the dispersion of job satisfaction in the
US, and the less dramatic effect in Germany. Other widespread and system-
atic changes in the workplace might be expected to have altered average levels
of job satisfaction, including the rising effort requirements of jobs and linked
to that a deterioration of ‘work–life balance’; the changing extent of task
discretion and other forms of employee involvement; and changing risks
associated with jobs. A further major change with implications for job satis-
faction is said to be the rising skills of jobs and workers, which is a result of
the skill-biased technological change and expanding education systems. More
education has not been found, in itself, to be associated with higher levels of
job satisfaction. Yet what may be more significant for understanding declines
in job satisfaction may be the changing extent to which workers’ skills do not
match their jobs (Borghans and de Grip 2000). An important finding in
industrial psychology is that job dissatisfaction can be generated when work-
ers do not ‘fit’ their jobs: an idea that applies both to skill levels and to
workers’ preferred hours of work (Spector 1997; see also Allen and van der
Velden 2001).
The paper’s central objective, then, is to investigate whether changes in the
intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of jobs can account for the observed
changes in job satisfaction (Section 3). Our strategy for doing this begins by
computing estimates of the determinants of job satisfaction, using nationally
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