The Job Satisfaction Of Employees

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Introduction

To respond to the rapid change in the environment today, leadership is necessary to change in order to adopt the change and avoid failure of a company.

Some researcher (Northouse, Peter Guy, 2001) suggested that the ethical theory provides a system of rules that gives a direction for human to define what is "right and wrong" and "fair and unfair" in order to achieve distributive justice. Ethical theory also provides an understanding about which thing to be done is exanimated as a morality behavior. This paper review two major ethical theories: Ethical Egoism, Utilitarianism and discuss how these two theories affects the efficiency and job satisfactory of the employee.

Job satisfaction is mainly concern about how the employees feel with their jobs, do they like or dislike theirs job. Job satisfaction affect their willingness to comply with directives or just give up the job. It is an attitudinal variable that can be a diagnostic indicator for the degree to which people like their job (Paul E. Spector, 1997). There are many ways that can be affect the job satisfaction, such as the relationship between employees, pay, benefits, working condition, and so on. This paper is mainly focus on the relationship between leader with ethical leadership and the job satisfaction of employees.

Ethical Leadership

Most but not all people share the same core values about how they would feel happy, when they are satisfied with the situation even if they are working. In generally, there are two points to view the world, one is selfish, and another is ethical. Selfish point of view means that people only consider itself and they do not respect others. They have their own core values to treat the things they are going to do. While ethical point of view means people whose are respecting people.

Ethical Leadership means the ways the leader behave, set the tone and builds the culture of an organization to effectively develop and empower the people in a company which is the critical success factor in a company (Linda M. Sama & Victoria Shoaf, 2008). This is the reason why the leadership in promoting work ethic in a company is being popular nowadays, leader often be involved to control the outcomes that may affect employees such as how they work to meet the goals. The leader is the ideal position to provide a role model for employees to follow, he can give some strong signal to the employees that the employees will maintain a strong ethical performance in facing such pressure. So that the leader can use the advantages of position to promote ethical conduct at work which makes ethics salient by modeling ethical conduct to employees.

Ethical is an intangible things that is very hard to describe in sentences, a code of ethics can be used. A code of ethics is a set of rules and guidelines that is used to set out the acceptable behavior for the employees, and also manger. The employee can govern themselves with such code of ethic when they are facing the ethical problem during their work. The format of the code of ethic can be totally different, it always started with the organizational values, principles, standards, controversial ethical situation they may face and the possible action they may do. To implement a code of conduct, ethics and compliance programs can be hold, for example, of employee training, discussion programs. When codes are implemented and embedded in the culture, reports of unethical behavior tend to be lower. (Ben A. Maguada & Robert M. Krone, 2009)

However, some of the researchers (Kaptein, Huberts, Avelino, & Lasthuizen, 2005) said that although there are almost all national government departments and 47 percent of the 100 largest local governments in Netherlands have codes of conduct, they told that the effectiveness of the use of code of conduct is elusive. In the Ethical leadership and employee’s job satisfaction, the effectiveness of using ethic in a company will be explained.

Ethical leadership and employee’s job satisfaction

There are some popular ethical theories that can be applied to the leadership. In this section, our discussion about how these theories will always fall the job satisfaction of the employee. To measures the job satisfaction, commitment, trust is used. The theories can be categorized as teleological theories, which are Ethical Egoism and Utilitarianism.

Commitment defined by (Bello, 2012) as loyalty and attachment of an individual or group to the organization. Organizational commitment is a state that employee who identifies with a particular organization and theirs willingness to maintain the membership with the company. Commitment had been used by organizations to predict desired employee behavior in the areas of performance, absenteeism and emotional attachment. Employees’ commitment is necessary for desirable organizational outcomes like job satisfaction (Lum, L, Kervin, J, Klark, K, Reid, F, & Sirola, W, 1998).

Trust is an emotional relationship between people which is the key component of successful working relationships between leaders and employees. Some researchers (Lenny van den Akker, Leonie Heres, Karin Lasthuizen, & Frédérique Six, 2009) agreed that trust enables cooperation, helps to management, promote information sharing, and increases the mutual acceptance.

Ethical Egoism

Ethical egoism states that a person should act so that he can create the greatest good for themselves. A leader with this act would take a job that he selfishly interest. Self-interest is an ethical stance that is similar to transactional leadership theory. The leader with transactional leadership are more aware of the goals and objectives of the organization (Singh, 2012). So that in some ways, such theories are able to implement strategies more effectively. But this theory do not promoting the ethics due to the fact that the employees only focus on the end and the goals. A famous professor in the Bayero University, Kano (Bello, 2012) agreed that in transactional leadership style, the leader only acts only with the purpose of gaining payment.

Ethical egoism is common in some organization and under lead by the ethical egoism leader, employees will only make decisions to achieve its goal to maximize the personal benefits. Social injustices will be occurred when individuals have put their own interests first.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism also called greatest happiness principle which decided whether an action is right or wrong by calculating difference of total happiness from the affected parties. Utilitarianism does not promote claim there is always a right thing to do in any situation, but it suggests there is always a best suit of action in different situation. Utilitarianism have different form which is act or rule based utilitarianism. Act utilitarianism is a consequentialist principle that focusing on the consequences. To identify an action is good, add up the change of happiness of all affected parties in terms of its potential to produce the greatest amount of good for the largest number of people. While rules utilitarianism focusing on adopting moral rules and which will greatly increase the total happiness if the rules is followed by every employees. It defines who will be benefit or harmed after the action and see whether the harm is more than the benefits or not.

Commitment

As mention in the Ethical Egoism section, the leader is focus on the end with theirs own interest. The efficient to meet the goals is increased, the employee may not happy if they do the things that may harm to them no matter the action is wrong which will produce a withdrawal behavior that the employees may have both psychological and physical withdrawal. The examples of psychological withdrawal is the employees may have daydreaming, looking busy and moonlighting while physical withdrawal means the employees may do things tardiness and absenteeism. These withdrawal will sharply decrease the performance in theirs work.

With utilitarianism, the organization has the common values and codes of conduct in employees including leader, employees work together with each other every day. A team of employees working together may having a lot of ethical conflicts between them unavoidably, leader can identify which is morally correct by calculating the total happiness is larger from the affected parties. It ensured that the fairness can be maximized. With such environment that is promoting fairness, the employee will shows their willingness to put in extra hours, effort and positive perceptions of their work.

A professor of leadership studies, (Price, 2008). His primary perspective on ethical leadership is recognized "universalizability. Act as though the maxim of your action were by your will become a universal law of nature. Under this principle, no leader is ever allowed to act in a way that is "exceptional" to the principle of "universalizability". All of the employee will commit to the company because they expected the others will do what they are promised.

Trust

Dirks and Ferrin (2002) found that the most important antecedents for trust in leaders are leadership style. In a transactional leadership, leader uses his position for personal gain and gain advantage to judge what action is morally right or wrong, so the trust cannot be established. The employees without trust will not offer their ideas, their enthusiasm, or their souls. They will not be satisfied in their position and so that the turnover rate will increased.

The utilitarianism is a form of transformational leadership as mention before. The researcher said that employees managed under transformational leadership, they have the equal interactional justice. With regard to trust in the leader, employees know that the leader do not above the law and they are treated as the same level of ethical which have a direct effect on employees trust their leader. If the employees trust each other, they will put extra effort on their job (Michael E. Brown & Marie S. Mitchell, 2010). In other words, they satisfying their job.

Ethical Leadership Maintenance

Maintain code of conduct

A formal ethics policy can play an important role in creating and maintaining ethical leadership, the code of ethics, can be a cornerstone of an ethics policy. The design of the code is very important. As noted, the ethical issues are addressed and the procedure of how they can eliminate the ethical issue and explain how to avoid happening the same situation. The code should address the issues with not only the employees are expected to comply but also sets out the daily ethical issues they may face.

Education

Training and awareness raising ensures the values and ethics are embedded in all of the employees in organization. Some activities like induction training programs can be hold regularly, during the programs, trainer can ensure that are understand what they learnt by obtaining advice on ethical issues and allowing them to speak up what they think.

Also, Leader can leading by example, with the power of the position of the leader, the organization would promote an ethical approach.

Conclusion