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Over the past 60 years, the examination of job satisfaction has been an interdisciplinary endeavor, including psychology (Argyle, 1989), sociology (Kalleberg and Loscocco, 1983; Hodson, 1985; Westover, 2016), economics (Freeman, 1978; Hamermesh, 2001), management sciences (Burgard, and Görlitz, 2014; de Menezes and Wood, 2015; Hunt and Saul, 1975; Siengthai and Pila-Ngarm, 2016; Van Dierendonck, 2015; Yadav and Rangenekar, 2015), and public administration (Wright and Kim, 2004; Jung et al., 2007). The persistent interest of academics and practitioners is due to several reasons: satisfied workers are more productive (Appelbaum and Kamal, 2000), deliver higher quality of work (Tietjen and Myers, 1998), and improve a firm’s competitiveness and success (Garrido et al., 2005). Conversely, unsatisfied workers are more frequently late for work, absent from work, and motivated to leave the firm (Blau, 1994; Lee, 1998). While job satisfaction has been thoroughly examined for decades, there is still relatively little known about the overall comparative nature work quality characteristics and job satisfaction across age cohorts, particularly from across the globe.
This research utilizes data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) (Work Orientations IV: 2015 – survey questions on job characteristics and job quality) to examine the following questions:
What are the empirical generational differences in workplace conditions, job characteristics, employee attitudes, and job satisfaction?
What are the causes behind these differences?
A brief literature review of age and generational differences in job satisfaction
While differences in job satisfaction can be due to a number of variables such as the nature of the work, work sector, social interactions, coworkers, supervision, pay, cultural values, work values, and personality (Robbins and Judge, 2017), age and generational differences are two key variables that merit further investigation. While much research has focused on age, conclusions vary. A limited amount of research has focused on generational differences and their impact on job satisfaction. We next review these two areas with primary emphasis on the latter.
Overall, there is considerable evidence that job satisfaction increases with age (Clark et al., 1996; Crites, 1969; Durst and DeSantis, 1997; Eichar et al., 1991; Hunter, 2007; Josiam et al., 2009; Katz, 2008; Ng and Feldman, 2010), with some evidence that the pattern follows a U-shaped curve (Clark et al.,...