Perdue Farm Responding To 21st Century Challenges

Employee satisfaction variables

Employee Satisfaction:

Employee satisfaction is considered to be a key indicator of productivity and customer satisfaction.

Employee satisfaction is a key to the success of the organization.

The Company's ability to fulfill the physical, emotional, and psychological needs of its employees is employee satisfaction.

Satisfaction:

Satisfaction is the psychological state that indicates how a person feels about his or her situation, based on an evaluation of the situation.

Motivation:

Motivation is the psychological state that exits whenever internal and or external forces simulate, direct or maintain behavior. In organizations the employee behaviors of interest include both productive and unproductive behaviors. By understanding motivation manager can increase productive behaviors such as coming on time and putting in more efforts.

Relation-ship between motivation and satisfaction:

Employee satisfaction and employee motivation goes hand in hand. A happy worker is a productive worker.

The relation ship between employee satisfaction and employee motivation is a bit difficult. We can better understand the relation ship with the two factor theory.

Two factor theory

Before it was assumed that if a person is dissatisfied with part of the job (for example pay) all that has to be done was to improve the factor (that means increase the pay) and this would lead to a higher satisfaction, greater motivation and higher performance.

But Herzberg and his co workers concluded that there are two set of factors that affect people in the workplace, each of which worked in different ways. These were hygiene factor and motivating factors.

Hygiene factors - creates dissatisfaction if they are not present. If they are present in a job setting, dissatisfaction will be lower, but satisfaction will not be high.. Hygiene factors are associated with the context of the job.

They include

* Technical supervision

* Inter personal relations -peers

* Salary

* Working conditions

* Status

* Company policy

* Job security

* Interpersonal relations - supervisor

Therefore providing fringe benefits, nice office, good vacation plans serve mainly to minimize the dissatisfaction and to keep people in organization. It does not lead to higher motivation and better performance.

Motivators - Are related to high satisfaction and willing ness to work harder. When they are present, these job factors may include more effort, but if they are absent, it will not produce dissatisfaction in most people. Motivators are associated with content of the job. They are factors such as responsibility and achievement. Therefore a person in a challenging job is likely to be satisfied and motivated to perform better. But the lack of challenging job does not cause dissatisfaction, merely the absence of satisfaction.

Motivators include

* Responsibility

* Achievement

* Advancement

* The work itself

* Recognition

* Possibility of growth

Importance of employee satisfaction:

Creating an organization filled with satisfied and motivated employees is not an end in and of itself. Motivation and satisfaction leads to other important consequences.

* Satisfied employees do perform better than dissatisfied ones

* It is a means for achieving business success

* Employee satisfaction drives productivity and customer satisfaction

* Reduced employee turnover

* Improved safety and grater profitability

* A dissatisfied employee may perform an acceptable level while searching for another job at the same time

Managerial approach:

The managerial approach focuses on how the manager's behavior influences the employee's satisfaction and motivation. The manager can motivate the employee through

* Personal communication

* Setting realistic goals

* Offering recognition, praise and monetary rewards

Job design Approach:

This approach of motivating employees emphasizes on design of the job. Manager can sometimes design the job the employees they supervise. An enriched job motivates employees rather than doing narrow job.

Organizational Approach:

Human resource management policies and practices are generally an important aspect of the organizational context. The appropriate benefits (e.g. paid vacations, sick leaves, insurance, child or elder care), reward structure (e.g. Bonuses, promotions) and development opportunities (e.g. education and mentoring) attract the new employees to the organization. Such policies increase employee effort and desire to stay with the organization.

Individual differences approach:

This approach treats motivation and satisfaction as characteristics of individuals. Individual differences are the unique needs, values, personalities and other characteristics that employee bring to their jobs. These differ from one person to next. This view suggests that an employee who offers a lot of good suggestion at one organization would be likely to do the same if worked with other organization.