JOB SATISFACTION AMONG ACADEMIC STAFF IN FISHERIES FACULTIES AT TURKISH UNIVERSITIES

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1 SOCIAL BEHAVIOR AND PERSONALITY, 2011, 39(10), Society for Personality Research JOB SATISFACTION AMONG ACADEMIC STAFF IN FISHERIES FACULTIES AT TURKISH UNIVERSITIES HULYA SAYGI, TOLGA TOLON, AND HATICE TEKOGUL Ege University, Izmir, Turkey We assessed the confidence of academics in their careers in fisheries faculties at Turkish universities and developed a scale based on the Job Satisfaction Questionnaire (Cellucci & DeVries, 1978) to classify their attitudes in order to evaluate level of job satisfaction. A survey and a personal information form were made available via the Internet to academics employed in various faculties of fisheries in Turkish universities. Testing for validity and reliability showed that the trust attitudes of academics could be examined with 5 factors: satisfaction with supervisors, satisfaction with coworkers, satisfaction with pay, satisfaction with promotion, and satisfaction with work itself. Results showed that coworkers and promotions were considered more important than the pay. The most important factor in job satisfaction was coworkers, with working as a team and sharing also rated as important. There was no significant difference in the rating of the factors according to gender. These findings are important as preliminary research in the fishing sector. Keywords: academic staff, job satisfaction, fisheries, Turkey. Job satisfaction is an attitude developed by an individual towards the job and job conditions (Luthans, 1994). It is also a personal evaluation of job conditions (e.g., the job itself, attitude of the administrator) or the results (e.g., pay, job security) of the job (Çetinkanat, 2000). Satisfaction with one s job consists of the internal reaction developed because of the perceptions about the job and also, because of job conditions. This reaction results from a system of norms, values, and expectations formed by the individual (Schneider & Snyder, 1975, cited in Cekmecelioglu, 2005). According to Davis (1981), job satisfaction occurs when the features of the job and the desires of those performing the job Hulya Saygi, Tolga Tolon, and Hatice Tekogul, Department of Aquaculture, Faculty of Fisheries, Ege University, Izmir, Turkey. Appreciation is due to anonymous reviewers. Please address correspondence and reprint requests to: Hulya Saygi, Faculty of Fisheries, Department of Aquaculture, Ege University, Bornova, Izmir 35040, Turkey. hulya.saygi@ege.edu.tr 1395

2 1396 JOB SATISFACTION FOR TURKISH FISHERIES ACADEMICS match one another. Locke (1969) defined the concept of job satisfaction as the pleasurable emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one s job as achieving or facilitating the achievement of one s job values (Nguni, Sleegers, & Denessen, 2006). An individual s career is the progression of his or her working life to gain more responsibility, better salary, more respect, and higher status (Can, Akgün, & Kavuncubaşı, 1995). However, it is pointed out that the term career partially evokes the degree or level of success in the field no matter what meaning is attached to it. As well as the individual s business life the career includes a major part of human life, it also defines the economic lifestyle. For this reason job satisfaction has become a major subject of study (Karaman & Altunoğlu, 2007). Even though academics think that there is inadequate resourcing for their jobs in terms of such things as course load or cost, researchers have generally shown that academic staff are satisfied with their jobs (Kinman, 2001). According to Hackman and Oldham (1975, p. 159), work satisfaction is defined as the happiness that workers feel for their jobs. According to Schermerhorn, Hunt, and Osborn (1994), it is the sensual reaction of the worker towards his job along with physical and social conditions, and it points to the corresponding degree of the expectations in the psychological contract of the worker (p. 144). Akçamete, Kaner, and Sucuoğlu (2001), define work satisfaction as corresponding of the values of the worker with his or her job at the office. As seen from these definitions, work satisfaction, expressed in the simplest form, depicts how pleased the worker is with his or her job. People naturally want to exhibit their personal talents. Any condition or perception negative to personal talents may cause work dissatisfaction, as well as psychological problems and complaints of the workers (Gignac & Appelbaum, 1997; Tanrıverdi, 2006). The stress built up by work in the person may be related to factors like too many tasks, duty conflicts, negative attitude of the management, and lack of decision-making ability. One of the most important factors currently affecting the higher education field is the gradual globalization of competition in every field. Global competition has become a significant element of pressure on universities to become competitive with other universities and to increase their institutional performances not only at the national, but also at the international level. This kind of pressure forces universities to review themselves in terms of goals, structure, processes, and education and also introduces new management methods in universities (Popli, 2005). Necessary precautions should be taken for the academic staff who are responsible for increasing the number of qualified workforce to match the needs of the country in order that they can work efficiently and achieve work satisfaction. While the production of new information performed by universities is directly related to the qualifications of the academics employed at these

3 JOB SATISFACTION FOR TURKISH FISHERIES ACADEMICS 1397 institutions, each enterprise intended to raise the quality of academics is very significant in this respect (Aytaç & Bayram, 2001). The importance of our study lies in the fact that it is preliminary research on the fisheries sector. Our aim was to establish the level of job satisfaction of academics working in faculties of fisheries in Turkey. These are the people who educate employees for the rapidly growing and increasingly important European aquaculture sector. The targeted aims in this study were to evaluate the general job satisfaction of the academics in fisheries faculties, to determine the level of their job satisfaction as assessed by a number of factors, and in the light of the results that emerged, to compile a list of suggestions to improve the job satisfaction of these academics. METHOD SAMPLE Participants were all members of fisheries faculties from 13 universities in Turkey. We selected 503 academics as the sampling group, but only 474 academics from 11 faculties were included in the survey because staff of two faculties did not reply to our request to join the survey. The survey was made available to the academics between February and April in 2009 through an Internet questionnaire form and 292 of the responses were evaluated. This represents a valid response rate of 61.6%, which is acceptable in social science research (Fowler, 1988). Of the 292 reponses used for analysis, 40.2% were from women and 59.8% from men. There were 78.3% participants who were married, 13% single, and 8.7% separated or divorced. The distribution of positions held by participant academics was: 76 assistant professors (26.2%); 44 associate professors (15.20%); 54 professors (18.50%); and 118 lecturers and researchers (40.30%). Most of the surveyed participants were employed in a department of aquaculture. Participants were between the ages of 40 and 44, 41.30% had children, 52.20% were householders, and 76.10% owned a vehicle. INSTRUMENT The 16-item Job Satisfaction Questionnaire was developed by Cellucci and DeVries (1978) and has been used by researchers in various fields, including business ethics. The scale has been shown to have acceptable reliability and validity (Deshpande, 1996; Vitell & Davis, 1990). A 5-point Likert scale ranging from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree is used, in which a low score indicates high dissatisfaction and a high score indicates high satisfaction (McFarlin, 1992). Principal components analysis and varimax transformation

4 1398 JOB SATISFACTION FOR TURKISH FISHERIES ACADEMICS were used as an orthogonal rotation to extract eigenvalues of factors equaling or exceeding 1 and factor loadings equaling or exceeding 0.6. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS The relationship between age and level of satisfaction was examined using Pearson correlation coefficients. Satisfaction score and title could not be examined by Pearson correlation analysis because variables such as gender were categorized; as a consequence, Spearman ordinal correlation coefficient was used for the examination of the data relationships in the coordination type. One-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were used to find out whether there were differentations in satisfaction grades with respect to title and university type. In case there were significant differences, paired comparisons were carried out using the Duncan test. All statistical evaluations were evaluated using the statistical program for social sciences (SPSS). RESULTS To establish whether or not the items in the scale were of such a quality as to constitute an additive scale, Tukey s test of additivity was administered; we found that the scale had the quality of additivity (F = ; p <.01). The scale was examined for structural validity. Construct validity of satisfaction affects the known variables (section, title, gender, age, marital status, children or no children, owning or not owning vehicles, and owning or not owning homes); which were derived from the scales obtained. Since there were significant correlations between the examined variables and the grades acquired from the scale, the scale was assumed to have structural validity (p <.05). The reliability of the scale was determined using Cronbach s alpha coefficient, and it was concluded that coefficients acquired that both for subscales and scales were adequate. The number of variables subjected to factor analysis in this research was 16 and sample size was 292. The sample was assumed to be adequate because the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) coefficient was In parallel with this sample size, the scale variables were subjected to factor analysis. Analysis revealed that academics express their career attitudes within 5 factors. Factor 1 (Satisfaction with supervisors): The managers I work for back me up ; The managers I work for are top notch ; My superiors do not listen to me ; My management does not treat me fairly. Factor 2 (Satisfaction with coworkers) ; I enjoy working with the people here ; I work with responsible people ; The people I work with do not give me enough support ; When I ask people to do things, the job gets done. Factor 3 (Satisfaction with pay): My work pays better than competitors ; My pay is adequate, considering the

5 JOB SATISFACTION FOR TURKISH FISHERIES ACADEMICS 1399 responsibilities I have ; My fringe benefits are generous. Factor 4 (Satisfaction with promotion): I do not like the basis on which people are promoted in my work place ; Promotions are infrequent in my work. Factor 5 (Satisfaction with work itself): I would rather be doing another job ; I get little sense of accomplishment from doing my job ; My job is interesting. These factors were established through preliminary tests and reviews with the academics as well as with reference to previous literature (Tsai & Huang, 2008). Accordingly, the first factor explains 32.77%, the second factor 44.41%, the third factor 54.55%, the fourth factor 63.42%, and the fifth factor 70.13% of the total variance. The reliability alpha values were: for the first factor, for the second factor, for the third factor, for the fourth factor, and for the fifth factor. These coefficients suggest that the factors were considerably reliable within themselves and that they had an internal validity. Also, for each of these five factors, the elimination of one of the variables was not appropriate since it did not raise the level of reliability when eliminated. There was no significant relationship between the gender variable and the general scale score (t = 1.48; p =.14). As a result of the analysis, we found the attitudes of the people towards the factors were similar for both males and females. No significant relationship was found between academics position and the general scale score (F = 1.37; p =.25). In terms of age a significant difference was seen in Factor 5 (F = 3.04; p =.01) and for position a significant difference was seen in Factor 5 (F = 2.50; p =.05). No significant relationship was found between marital status and general scale score (F = 1.77; p =.18). A significant lower level relationship in the same direction was found between the scale scores (r =.21; p <.05) for marital status. For marital status, Factor 1 was considered to be significant (F = 2.43; p =.05). For married participants the confidence level in their career increased. No significant relationship was found between having or not having children and general scale score (t =.98; p =.32). In sectors like fisheries, the most important factor in job satisfaction is regarded as coworkers, with working as a team and sharing also seen as important. While working with a responsible group affects the degree of job satisfaction profoundly in a positive direction, not getting the necessary support and help has a negative effect on the performance of the academics. The results clearly indicate that there are areas in which job satisfaction could be improved for those working in the fisheries sector. According to this, the factor which most affects job satisfaction is the matter of promotion (Factor 4). Promotions not being given frequently and equally was viewed negatively.

6 1400 JOB SATISFACTION FOR TURKISH FISHERIES ACADEMICS The factor dealing with supervisors (Factor 1) shows that respondents mostly agreed that satisfaction with supervisors was affected by the managers who back up and support employees. The general result that was revealed for academics working in faculties of fisheries was that coworkers and the promotions are more important than the payment they get in establishing the degree of satisfaction with the job. DISCUSSION Cognitive and affective behaviors of the individuals who took part in the study were tested to obtain information for evaluating career attitudes. Since such behavior patterns carry abstract features, as distinctive from concrete features, we chose to develop a scale through using reliability and validity analysis aimed at evaluating the related behavior patterns for the abstract features. Schein (1985) found that most of the definite behavior patterns, values, and attitudes that the person experiences during his/her career are set in place at the beginning of life. Needs and motives, which are caused by the combination of these sets of values manage, balance, and complete a person s business experience. In this way the person is enabled to make choices about his or her career. This process is described as career anchors by Schein, that is, a person will tend to stay anchored in one of eight areas of work technical or managerial competence, autonomy, security, creativity, service or dedication, challenge, and lifestyle and their career path will echo this anchoring in many ways. Schein described how career planning proceeded through an exploration process in business (Dessler, 1988). Schein considered that individual and business become integrated only on condition that values of personal attitudes like technical talent, management skill, permanent security, creativity, and independence conform to the values of the organization in which the person works (De Cenzo & Robbins, 1996). Some people may not be able to identify their attitudes until making a decision about choice of career. At this point former work experience, interests, talents and inclinations, personality, and individual strengths of the person will help establish the adaptation point. Based on the findings gained in this study, the following are the key points. It is very important that the university understands the needs of its employees and provides what is best for them. But, according to Nielson (2011), the response rate is higher in face-to-face interviews (70%) compared to web-based interviews (40%). Although we are currently conducting a study to describe the satisfaction of academics, further work is needed to assess the impact of face-to-face interviews with these people. To sum up, because of the excessive effect of the limitations mentioned above on the levels of satisfaction, it would be appropriate to make a similar study in the

7 JOB SATISFACTION FOR TURKISH FISHERIES ACADEMICS 1401 future in order to lessen the effects of such elements. This would also shed light on the effects of the steps taken to improve the employees level of satisfaction. In this way, a general level of satisfaction can be measured without the negative effects of the changes made to improve the employees level of satisfaction. In the light of the work that will be done to improve the job satisfaction of the academics in faculties of fisheries and academics with similar job situations; efforts aimed at focusing on and improving the factors determined in the research can provide the right approach about the matter of job satisfaction with the inclusion of a very comprehensive range of factors. Respondents were asked what should be done in order to improve their job satisfaction. They believe that it is necessary to increase funding so that it is sufficient for them to improve themselves, to provide more support for the research, to increase the cooperation of academics with the industry, to encourage the academics to take courses of study, and to attend both domestic and international seminars and meetings. Through the findings described in this study, a general level of satisfaction can be measured. Similar studies in other countries have vital importance for comparison of the results as well as generalization to other countries and different types of jobs. REFERENCES Akçamete, G., Kaner, S., & Sucuoğlu, B. (2001). Burnout, job satisfaction, and personality. Ankara: Nobel. Aytaç, M., & Bayram, N. (2001). The classification of the confidence attitudes of academicians. Paper presented at the 5th International Econometrics and Statistics Symposium, Çukurova University, Adana. Accessed from Can, H., Akgün, A., & Kavuncubaşı, S. (1995). Personnel management in the public and private sectors. Ankara: Siyasal. Cekmecelioglu, H. G. (2005). Örgüt İkliminin İş Tatmini ve İşten Ayrılma Niyeti Üzerindeki Etkisi: Bir Araştırma [The effects of organizational climate on job satisfaction and intention to leave: A research]. Journal of University of Cumhuriyet Economic and Administrative Sciences, 6, Cellucci, A. J., & DeVries, D. L. (1978). Measuring managerial satisfaction: A manual for the MJSQ. Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership. Çetinkanat, C. (2000). Örgütlerde Güdülenme ve İş Doyumu. Ankara: Anı Yayıncılık. Davis, F. W. (1981). Job satisfaction and stress. Journal of Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance, 52(9), De Cenzo, D. A., & Robbins, S. P. (1996). Human resource management (5th ed.). New York: Wiley. Deshpande, S. P. (1996). The impact of ethical climate types on facets of job satisfaction: An empirical investigation. Journal of Business Ethics, 15(6), Dessler, G. (1988). Personnel management (4th ed.). New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Fowler, F. C. (1988). In search of equality and competitiveness: French education after 58 reforms. International Education, 18, Gignac, A., & Appelbaum, S. H. (1997). The impact of stress on customer service representatives: A comparative study. Journal of Workplace Learning, 9(1),

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