Job Satisfaction in the 21st Century

Discuss about the Unhappy Employees Respond Destructively to their Job Dissatisfaction.

Employees make a company, and a company makes an employee. Well this has been long said and done. After all, it is about being in a cohesive environment where each and every one is responsible for the growth of the other. Job satisfaction is an integral requisite for a healthy workforce. A happy employee can do wonders for the organisation, and an unhappy employee and do its opposite. In this report we will be discussing how Unhappy employees respond destructively to their job dissatisfaction.

We will discuss in the report about the factors which lead to job dissatisfaction and how employees respond to it (negatively). With this, there is a real time cases study example from certain established organisation and how they reacted to the situation with focusing on the expected reaction with solution to the above situation.

The thesis statement for this essay is how the employees who are unhappy with their jobs could affect the several areas of the work and their behaviour can affect the other employees as well.

Job satisfaction is an alarming trend in the 21^st century these days. Do whatever, people aren’t happy at all. Employees are the most important part of a workforce and often are the ones who are the most neglected too. Job satisfaction is defined as the feeling of enjoyment that an employee experiences while at work. Job satisfaction leads to job happiness. Job happiness is considered state where employee receives a complete satisfaction which is influenced by factors like- pay, timing, increments and incentives, policies etc (Michalak, Kiffin & Ashkanasy, 2018). It is the prime responsibility of the HR of a department to take care of the fact that the people of the organisation are not just happy, but loyal in the working too and actually look forward to coming to the office. An unhappy workforce can never contribute in the growth and the upliftment of the company, and this is something which is a matter of concern for the people of the company too. 

Many at times it is the fault of the leadership of the organisation because of which it happens, and by the time someone realises it, it is often too late. An unhappy or dissatisfied employee can wreak havoc in the workplace and do more harm than good. There can be reasons why an employee is unhappy: underpaid, lack of challenging work, monotonous cycle, poor compensation policies, lack in quality of HR and many more, the list can simply go on without an end until someone really steps in to stop it (Darrat, Amyx & Bennett, 2017).

Factors Contributing to Unhappy Workforce

The job stress: Here, the employees are not happy with their jobs and are seen to experience and report stress on the job. They are not able to do their work and feel dissatisfied without any appreciation with stressed out feeling throughout the day. The poor overall morale of one employee could be a disaster for the entire team as if one employee is not able to give 100% to the work, then it becomes difficult for the other employees to put in their best as well. Here, the HR needs to make sure that they just don’t retain the employees, but also to keep them happy through appreciation, or through recommending them for better projects. This will add to their productivity and bring in a new zeal and enthusiasm in them to work. (Chaughry, Srivastava & Joshi, 2018). The argument will be based on how the employees often react to the above-mentioned situation in a destructive way and can lead to certain unwanted situations. There are certain times when the people of the organisation do not really understand what exactly is to be done about their unhappy state and why does it happen. It is to be noted and accepted that employees today are unhappy, and it really does not matter if they work in some daily 9 to 5 job with everything regular and normal, or if they work in giants like Google, Tessla or Apple. After all, there is no end to expectations.

Following can be the reasons for an unhappy workforce:

• Underpaid: the people of the organisation are not happy with their compensatory practices. They often feel that he compensation being paid to them (financial or non-financial) is not enough and crave for more. They often feel that the HR of the organisation does not understand their needs and has designed a pay scale which is not regularly revised.
• Lack of challenges: the lack of challenging work and the excitement which keeps the excitement built up often lacks in the job. These people do not enjoy their job and lead a monotonous routine. This routine keeps them fixated and hence, irritation starts building up and this leads to frustration (Skogstad, Nielsen & EInarsen, 2017).
• Company policies: the policies of the company are not up to the mark. This is one major reason why the employees do not enjoy the work and feel irritated. It is important for the employees of the organisation to feel that they are being taken care of, be it via the compensation or the welfare policies being set for them.
• Lack in opportunities to learn and grow: if the employees of the organisation feel that they do not have enough opportunities in the existing organisation to learn and grow their skills, this will not only add to the feeling of being unhappy and restricted but will also create an air of dissatisfaction in the people too. 

• Lack of recognition: if the employees feel that they are not recognised enough, then they feel that their efforts are going wasted and that they should not be putting in so much efforts for no reason. This is the starting point where people do not enjoy their work and stop contributing towards building their organisation and doing their job in a nice way and work half-heartedly (Mishra, 2015). Because of this, the dissatisfaction among the employee and the employer keeps rising up leading to friction between both of them, hence work gets affected and so does their mental peace.

It is important for the company to work on the performance by finding the meaning of the tasks and then focusing on regaining a positive attitude. The people need to focus on reducing the expectation where the employees devote their job to employers for career and socialisation with personalised and intellectual growth opportunities. Here, the employee relations are focused on realizing the workplace that has changed with educational opportunities, celebrations and the room for the advancement in career. (Zhou et al., 2015). It is important for the people to approach the work as an opportunity to learn rather than considering it as destructive with failure at work. There are daily new challenges at work and with it comes the probability of learning better experiences from mistakes. the setting of the goals can help the workers in achieving the sense of accomplishment with the long-term targets. (Choi, Madjar & Yun 2018). This creates a very negative environment in the office and brings down the energy of everyone ese as well. The employees stop reporting timely and the deadlines are often extended because of this. This results in the loss of goodwill of the company amongst the clients as well. 

Real-Time Example of Unhappy Employees – Fuji Films Case Study

We can take an example of how the situation worsened in real time at Fuji films, Japan. The company was following a very old policy for their employees, which was genuinely in need of change as it was not able to need the expectations of the employee in the real time. Even though the company was working well, its employees started falling out. They were no happier at work and started to either leave the job, or work at the bare minimum. An environment of dissatisfaction engraved the company, and it eventually fell apart. Fuji films lost its customer base to Kotak and Cannon and it took them almost a year and half to restructure their goodwill and retain their lost customer base. This not only wasted a lot of time and energy, but also resulted in the loss of employees and their interest towards the company (Tiwari, 2015). This real time example teaches us two major things that we should be following in our companies:

• That listening to employees and catering to their needs is extremely important in order to keep the functioning well
• To make sure that the people of the organisation are always motivated

These two things can be well taken care of if proper communication channel is maintained in the company and people are given the freedom to work properly and by telling the HR and the leadership their needs (D’Angelo et al., 2016). The problem was and has been identified to be recurring issue, common to all the organisation and if no solution is found that often the organisation employees go destructive in either a subtle way or upfront. Sometimes, dissatisfaction can also lead to the people being really aggressive and going on strikes. Here, the HR of the organisation has an important role to play in order to mellow down the situation and build for the employees an environment where they can enjoy a certain level of comfort and at the same time maintain respect for the company and their profession. Job satisfaction leads to job happiness (Muzanenhamo, 2016).

Consideirng the change in the levels of the workplace, the employees could be satisfied if:

1. A proper and the respectful treatment is given to the employees at the different levels.
2. The trust between the employees and the benefits with better compensation and job security could help them to be enthusiastic at work.
3. At work, there are different opportunities which could be effective to improve the employee ideas along with management recognition of employee job performance.
4. The recognition of performance is collaborated with the handling of details related to the strength of the people at the company. It helps them to be more engaged and productive apart from being creative as well. (Giorgi, Shoss & Leon-Perez, 2015).

Conclusion

The low satisfaction at job ad the lower morale of the employee equals to the lack of opportunity and the productivity in the company. The focus on work does not go well and they do not pay attention to the work effectively. Hence, for this, being a member of the team, they display low productivity with the dissatisfaction in the results. The low satisfaction with high employee turnover rates is the major factor with inability to retain the qualifier workers. (Mattarelli & Tagliaventi, 2015). First, job satisfaction is a direct function of the involvement of the HR into meeting the expectation of the employees specially when they are well-functioning and expect certain returns in return (can be financial or non-financial). Often the HR of the company does not realise how important it is to make sure that these people are well taken care of because they are the ones how actually bear the burden of work. 

References 

Chaudhry, S., Srivastava, B. N., & Joshi, C. (2018). Vendor response to client opportunism in IT service relationships: Exploring the moderating effect of client involvement. Industrial Marketing Management.

Choi, W., Madjar, N., & Yun, S. (2018). Suggesting creative solutions or just complaining: Perceived organizational support, exchange ideology, and learning goal orientation as determining factors. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 12(1), 68.

D’angelo, S., Coggon, D., Harris, E. C., Linaker, C., Sayer, A. A., Gale, C. R., … & Palmer, K. T. (2016). Job dissatisfaction and the older worker: baseline findings from the Health and Employment After Fifty study. Occup Environ Med, 73(8), 512-519.

Darrat, M. A., Amyx, D. A., & Bennett, R. J. (2017). Examining the impact of job embeddedness on salesperson deviance: The moderating role of job satisfaction. Industrial Marketing Management, 63, 158-166.

Giorgi, G., Shoss, M. K., & Leon-Perez, J. M. (2015). Going beyond workplace stressors: Economic crisis and perceived employability in relation to psychological distress and job dissatisfaction. International Journal of Stress Management, 22(2), 137.

Mattarelli, E., & Tagliaventi, M. R. (2015). How offshore professionals’ job dissatisfaction can promote further offshoring: Organizational outcomes of job crafting. Journal of Management Studies, 52(5), 585-620.

Michalak, R. T., Kiffin?Petersen, S. A., & Ashkanasy, N. M. (2018). ‘I Feel Mad So I Be Bad’: The Role of Affect, Dissatisfaction and Stress in Determining Responses to Interpersonal Deviance. British Journal of Management.

Mishra, B. S. (2015). Job Performance and Motivation among Government Employees in Uttar Pradesh. Anveshana, 5(2), 75-98.

Muzanenhamo, G. N. (2016). The Relationship Between Change Implementation, Organisational Citizenship Behaviour and Job Satisfaction in the Business Process Outsourcing Industry in the Western Cape, South Africa(Doctoral dissertation, Cape Peninsula University of Technology).

Skogstad, A., Nielsen, M. B., & Einarsen, S. (2017). Destructive Forms of Leadership and Their Relationships with Employee Well?Being. Leading to Occupational Health and Safety: How Leadership Behaviours Impact Organizational Safety and Well-Being, 163.

Tiwari, V. K. (2015). Motivation and performance in administration a study of the bureaucracy in Lucknow region.

Zhou, W., He, G., Wang, H., He, Y., Yuan, Q., & Liu, D. (2015). Job dissatisfaction and burnout of nurses in Hunan, China: A cross?sectional survey. Nursing & health sciences, 17(4), 444-450.