Employee Performance, Motivation, And Job Satisfaction: An Analysis Of Relevant Data

Data collection and variables

Employee performance, motivation and job satisfaction are key influencers of overall organizational performance outcomes (George and Mallery, 2016). Dobre (2013) drew on this point to analyse what drives employee motivation and what demotivates employees and thus affects the organizational performance.

The paper consists of the analysis of relevant data regarding employee performance, motivation and certain factors that may influence them. The analysis focusses on the contention of employee behaviour, environmental circumstance, organisational culture, employee traits and habits to infer and try to empirically determine performance and satisfaction among employees. The analysis makes use of statistical tools such as descriptive statistics, regression modelling, correlational measures and theory of significance testing to reach at the concluding inference.

The data consists of six demographic data variables and ten other metrics representing various employee attributes and the organization’s attributes. The data had been collected via a cross-sectional survey on three hundred salespersons employed in various companies by another external data collection agency.

The demographic data variables that were gathered are size (as per the number of employees) and age (in terms of years since established) of the organization that the respondent is employed in, the gender and age of the respondent, educational qualification level of the respondent, represented through an ordinal variable with four levels ranging from high school at lowest level to associate degree, then bachelor’s degree and then master’s degree at highest level, and the hierarchical position of the respondent within the organization which is represented by a similar variable with levels ranging from a mere employee at lowest level to supervisor, middle manage and then top manager or CEO at highest level.

The remaining ten variables which are the main metrics under consideration cover scores on job satisfaction, motivation and extent of self-monitoring with minimum score of 1 and maximum of 5 as stated by the responded, performance, dynamism, competitiveness, perception of job autonomy experienced, psychopathy score and narcissism score with minimum score of 1 and maximum 7, a metric to score the inclination towards unethical tendencies of respondent with minimum score of 1 and maximum 6.

Belias and Koustelios in 2014, in their peer reviewed critical review of the relationship between an organization’s culture and the level of job satisfaction experienced and reported by its employees asserted as its conclusion that they had found that an employee’s experience of job is affected by a variety of environmental and demographic factors such as the work environment, their experiences and relationship with co-workers, the mission and vision of the organization and demographic features like gender which was found to be of particular relevance. Again, Boddy (2014) hypothesized that the presence of employees with psychopathic tendencies and behaviour lead to increased conflict, bullying in the work place, lowers the overall wellbeing of the employee ecosystem and ultimately leads to increased behavioural patterns fuelling counterproductive work. Gayathiri et al. (2013), discussed the linkages between work life quality, satisfaction in job and performance outcomes of the company.

Literature review

Keeping in mind, the existing literature on the topic of discussion, a model to account for performance of a company based on job satisfaction and motivation has been explored and developed. The assumptions laid down in the following section were arrived upon considering the available literature on the relationship between employee work conditions, environment and profile with that of the overall organizational culture and attitude. The relationship arising out of contrasting the factors amongst one another with the performance outcome of the enterprise was taken into cognizance and that further played a part into the formulation of the idea behind the imagined model.

A multiple mediation model is thus assumed to carry forward the analysis. The dependent variable job performance is thus assumed to be related to the independent variables through the mediator variables job satisfaction and job motivation. Job satisfaction is initially hypothesized to be dependent on designation, autonomy, self-brand connection, inclination towards unethical activities and narcissism and psychopathy levels. Job motivation on the other hand is hypothesized to be dependent on dynamism and competitiveness of the organization. Demographic aspects such as age, gender and education are also under consideration as tentative factors affecting the outcome.

Looking at the summarized values of the demographic variables under consideration in the study, it is seen that mean age of the employees is 39.03 years and the ages are distributed around the median value 37.The standard error for the mean has been found to be 0.89 and standard deviation is 13.963.The skewness measure is 0.3. This suggests that the ages of the employees being considered all are more or less focussed around the central tendency measures. The minimum age was seen to be 18 whereas the maximum was 68.The size of the organizations to which these employees belong have an average of 35646.09 with standard error 10937.975. The median however is much lower at 300 and the standard deviation is seen to be quite large at 189451.282.The skewness measure is observed to be 8.874. This implies that the organizations under consideration vary considerably in size. The distribution of size is highly negatively skewed and has high dispersion around the mean. The size or the number of employees working for the organizations was found to range from 10 to 2100000. The ages of the organizations have been found to have the mean value as 41.17 with its standard error 1.855.The median age of the organizations are found to be 30 whereas the standard deviation is 32.134.The measure of skewness is 1.201. Therefore although there is mild negative skewness, the organizations are seen to be more or less around the ages 30 to 45 with minimum age 3 and maximum age 158.

Hypothesized model and analysis

Then again considering the ordinal demographic variables such as gender, it has been seen that out of the 300 employees 199 were women , 101 were men. Looking at the  level of education of the employees, categorized into high school or a lower degree, associate degree, bachelor’s degree and masters degree, it was seen that out of the 300 participants, 20 had masters degree or higher, 119 had completed till bachelor’s degree, 80 graduated with an associate’s degree and 81 had studied till high school or lower. Again, 173 out of the 300 were regular employees, 44 held the position of supervisor, 57 were middle managers and 26 had designation of top manager or executive.

Out of the variables identified and specified as the hypothesized model considerations, age of the employees were found to be significantly positively correlated with reported autonomy scores and the age of the organization whereas it was significantly negatively correlated with psychopathy scores. Psychopathy was also found to be significantly negatively correlated with motivation and satisfaction. Autonomy was found to be significantly correlated positively with self-brand connection or sbc, motivation and satisfaction which were all found to be significantly positive correlated with one another (Tuncdogan et al., 2017).

Using SPSS, fit of the hypothesized regression models were checked and the following results were found. It was seen that although motivation had significant effect on performance scores at 5% level of significance, satisfaction did not have significant effect (Ott and Longnecker, 2015). Motivation was found to have a positive effect on performance scores. Gender was another factor found to significantly affect performance scores. The effect was seen to be negative implying, that a male is expected to produce greater performance scores, Therefore, only motivation was considered as the moderator variable and out of the identified independent variables that were expected to affect motivation, sbc, autonomy and psychopathy was found to have statistically significant effects with 5% level of significance. Psychopathy was found to have a negative effect on motivation and the other two had positive affects as expected from the correlation measures discussed above (McCormick et al., 2017). The model specifications and goodness of fit measures can be found in the appendix.

It was assumed in the study that performance scores are normally distributed variables. The subsequent analysis was hence carried out using linear regression modelling technique. However the data used for the analysis was limited to 300. This could have made the analysis vulnerable to specification errors. The study could thus have been improved by use of more subjects or data points.

Conclusion

Therefore, in conclusion, the analysis presents the results that satisfaction is a relevant factor which influences motivation and vice versa. It has strong associations with sbc, autonomy and psychopathy which all effect motivation. Additionally, performance is found to be significantly affected by motivation. This means that even though satisfaction is a relevant factor which may affect performance, it is associated with performance outcomes via motivation which is the main factor found to be relevant to performance scores. Psychopathy has been found as a deterrent to high performance scores with its negative effect on employee motivation. Therefore presence of psychopathic behaviour among employees could compromise performance of the organization. Lastly, it organizations with more men are expected to perform better than ones with more women.

References

Belias, D. and Koustelios, A., 2014. Organizational culture and job satisfaction: A review. International Review of Management and Marketing, 4(2), p.132.

Boddy, C.R., 2014. Corporate psychopaths, conflict, employee affective well-being and counterproductive work behaviour. Journal of Business Ethics, 121(1), pp.107-121.

Dobre, O.I., Employee motivation and organizational performance.

Faraway, J.J., 2014. Linear models with R. CRC press.

Gayathiri, R., Ramakrishnan, L., Babatunde, S.A., Banerjee, A. and Islam, M.Z., 2013. Quality of work life–Linkage with job satisfaction and performance. International Journal of Business and Management Invention, 2(1), pp.1-8.

George, D. and Mallery, P., 2016. IBM SPSS Statistics 23 step by step: A simple guide and reference. Routledge.

McCormick, K., Salcedo, J., Peck, J. and Wheeler, A., 2017. SPSS Statistics for data analysis and visualization. John Wiley & Sons.

Ott, R.L. and Longnecker, M.T., 2015. An introduction to statistical methods and data analysis. Nelson Education.

Tuncdogan, A., Boon, A., Mom, T., Van Den Bosch, F. and Volberda, H., 2017. Management teams’ regulatory foci and organizational units’ exploratory innovation: The mediating role of coordination mechanisms. Long Range Planning, 50(5), pp.621-635.