Determinants of the Job Satisfaction of Public Officials: Testing the Mediation Effect of Organizational Commitment

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Determinants of the Job Satisfaction of Public Officials: Testing the Mediation Effect of Organizational Commitment Seejeen Park 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract Extant public management research investigated the determinants of public employees’ job satisfaction. However, most public management studies tested the relationship between limited numbers of factors and job satisfaction. The current study seeks to investigate the direct effects of supervisor satisfaction, public service motivation, and job characteristics on job satisfaction and the indirect effects mediated by organizational commitment. Survey data collected from central government agencies in the Republic of Korea are used in the empirical analysis. The findings suggest that all three factors indirectly affect job satisfaction through organizational commitment. Only job characteristics were found to directly affect job satisfaction. Keywords Job satisfaction . Job characteristics . Public service motivation . Supervisor

satisfaction . Organizational commitment Employee job satisfaction is among the most frequently studied variables in both the organizational and public management literature (Rainey 2009; Cantarelli et al. 2016). The general consensus of public management research is that enhancing public employees’ satisfaction with their jobs results in positive organizational outcomes. Public employees with high job satisfaction can attain high productivity and are expected to show positive workplace behaviors (Frampton 2014). More specifically, the job satisfaction of employees in public organizations has been found to be associated with variables, such as job performance, motivation, turnover intention, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behaviors (Kim 2012; Fernandez and Moldogaziev 2013; Homberg et al. 2015). Therefore, job satisfaction has been a popular topic in the literature.

* Seejeen Park [email protected]

1

Department of Public Administration, KwangWoon University, Seoul, South Korea

Park S., Woon K.

The frequently studied determinants of job satisfaction include organizational commitment (Park and Rainey 2007; Chordiya et al. 2017), satisfaction with supervisors or supervisory behavior (Ellickson and Logsdon 2002; Mathieu et al. 2016), public service motivation (PSM) (Naff and Crum 1999; Wright and Pandey 2008; Caillier 2016), the work environment (Wright and Davis 2003), private-public sector differences (Wang et al. 2012), the impact of political change (Tabvuma et al. 2014), participative management (Kim 2002), employee empowerment (Fernandez and Moldogaziev 2013), leader-member exchange (LMA), managerial trust, job performance, and goal ambiguity (Hsieh 2016), followership (Jin et al. 2016), and cutbacks (Van der Voet and Vermeeren 2017). Nevertheless, in the public management literature, to date, a comprehensive model incorporating the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of job satisfaction has not been developed because the relationship between job s