دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی اثرات پیش بینی و سازگاری تغییرات دستمزد درونی و بین فردی بر رضایت شغلی - الزویر 2018

Abstract

This paper analyses how individual job satisfaction is affected by wage changes. In order to account for potential dynamic effects of wage changes on job satisfaction, we include lead and lag effects of wage changes in our analysis. Furthermore, we examine the role of social comparisons. This strategy allows us to account for implications of behavioural theory and permits an appropriate methodological approach. Our results indicate that wage changes have a statistically significant positive effect on job satisfaction. This effect exhibits a dynamic pattern. We observe an anticipation effect and positive, but declining effects on job satisfaction four years after the wage increase, i.e., partial adaptation. We find that an additional increase in job satisfaction is obtained when the individual’s wage change exceeds the average wage change for his reference group. However, this effect does not appear to persist, since it fades out two years after the wage change.

8 Conclusion

Wage increases are one of the most common methods used by firms to stimulate employee motivation. On the superficial level, this seems to be a reasonable practice, since hardly anybody would argue that employees dislike positive wage changes. Yet, the persistence of employee satisfaction remains a far more arguable matter. With this analysis we have contributed to answering the question of whether wage increases really buy enhanced and persistent employee job satisfaction. We thereby also elicited the reference dependence of individuals’ evaluation of job satisfaction. In our analysis, we have estimated a job satisfaction equation and simultaneously included a lead and lag structure of wage changes in our model and accounted for social comparisons using representative individual panel data for Germany from 1990 to 2013. Our findings indicate that individuals anticipate wage changes one year prior to their actual occurrence. Further, our results show that people at least partially or even fully adapt to wage changes within three to four years after a realised wage change. Furthermore, receiving a wage increase above one’s respective peer group enhances individual job satisfaction. On the other hand, social comparisons appear to play a minor role in job satisfaction when simultaneously controlling for intraindividual comparisons. When we disentangled positive and negative wage changes, we found that individuals fully adapt to positive wage changes and that wage decreases are partly absorbed by interindividual comparisons. Finally, adaptation appears to decelerate once we cleared our sample of individuals who have changed their job between the observations, indicating that adaptation to wage changes is partly driven by the associated adaptation to a new job for individuals who assumed new within-firm positions or changed their employer.