To Minsk (Минск) and Beyond!

The Impact of other Individual Factors on Belarusian Worker Satisfaction

I have already posted on differences in self-reported Belarusian worker satisfaction levels based on profession/job type, education level, and age.  Today I wanted to look at the role of other individual factors on worker satisfaction (Note: While the job satisfaction literature identifies many important individual factors that may impact worker satisfaction and/or should be controlled for in statistical analyses, the following tables represent those factors that are available in the World Values Survey data for Belarus, limited as they may be).

Table 1 shows that married and divorced Belarusian respondents experience significantly higher job satisfaction levels than individuals who are separated (by far the lowest), widowed, and single.  This is mostly in line with the job satisfaction literature, which has consistently shown that married individuals report the highest job satisfaction levels.  However, the high job satisfaction scores for divorced Belarusians is an interesting and contradictory finding and warrants additional examination.

Table 1:

Somewhat surprisingly, Table 2 shows that religious observance has little consistent impact on self-reported job satisfaction levels, while Belarusians who attend religious services once a week have the lowest self-reported job satisfaction and those that only attend on "other specific holidays" have by far the highest.  This is at odds with much of the job satisfaction and religion literature, which has consistently shown that higher levels of religiosity often carry over into other areas of perceived satisfaction (whether it be marital, work, or life satisfaction) an warrants additional examination.

 Table 2:

Table 3 shows a significant impact of self-reported income level on self-report job satisfaction for both Belarusian male and female workers (consistent with existing literature), while Belarusian women job satisfaction is even more positively impacted by higher income than it is for males workers (inconsistent; the literature has shown that male job satisfaction levels tend to be more greatly impacted by income than for woman).

Table 3: 

While I already looked at job satisfaction by profession, Table 4 shows comparative mean job satisfaction scores by chief wage earner profession/job type (a slight but not insignificant distinction).  We see that chief wage earners working as managers in larger organizations, as professional workers, as semi-skilled manual workers, and as members of the armed forces result in relatively higher job satisfaction scores for the respondent, while junior level non-manual chief wage earners have the lowest.

Table 4: 

Consistent with the existing job satisfaction literature, Table 5 shows a very clear and significant increase in self-reported mean job satisfaction scores for those Belarusian workers who have some level of supervisory responsibilities on the job, as compared with those who do not.  

Table 5: 

Another important individual factor that is often looked at in the job satisfaction literature is household composition.  Unfortunately, the WVS data for Belarus does not have much in that regard.  However, Table 6 does look at the number of adults in the home and shows little difference on self-reported job satisfaction scores by the number of adults living in the home, while there is a significant jump from 1 to 2 adults, followed by a modest decline with each additional adult in the home.

Table 6: 

In the existing literature, the size of the organization in which an individual works has been shown to impact overall job satisfaction levels.  Interestingly, Table 7 shows little consistent impact of the number of other workers in the organization on job satisfaction.  Those individuals in organizations with 500-999 employees have the lowest self-reported job satisfaction (5.2), while those in organizations with 2500 and more employees have the highest (6.7), with mixed results at other tiers of organizational size.

Table 7: 

And while it has been noted in previous posts, it should be reiterated that overall job satisfaction in Belarus does not differ significantly by gender, though there are significant gender differences by other individual/demographic factors and certainly gender will be an important individual control variable in future statistical analysis.

My next post will look at the role of these and other individual factors on Belarusian life satisfaction.