Service learning and job satisfaction survey.

Abstract

This service-learning project provided students an opportunity to practice consulting skills, including a structured face-to-face interview, job satisfaction surveys, and formal presentation of final results to small businesses in a suburban community in West Virginia. In this project designed as a quasi-experimental study in a repeated measure, an 18-item open-ended questionnaire served as the mechanism in structured interviews and the Job Descriptive Index (JDI) was used before and after the interview. As a result, 80 employees from four different small businesses: health insurance, janitorial work, home improvement, and assisted residence, completed this project. Students enrolled in "Industrial/Organizational Psychology" or "Seminar on Organizational Behaviors" gained a realistic consulting experience. Small businesses received a statistical analysis of employee' s job satisfaction.

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Current Problems

Within Academia--In Industrial/Organizational Psychology both faculty and students receive a great deal of pressure and difficulty when they want to apply academic learning in reality. There are quite few organizations willing to offer opportunities to current students, either graduate or undergraduate level, for practicum or internship. Organizations simply assume current students are "inexperienced". Students in Industrial/Organizational Psychology can hardly get involved in real organizational problems before graduation. This deprives them of competency and makes them less competitive in the job market. When they are looking for employment, due to the lack of practical experience, they are continually treated as "inexperienced". The situation gets worse for faculty members at universities located in suburban communities in West Virginia when they attempt to outreach for the purpose of program development, because there are few middle or big organizations to be considered for students' practicum or internship.

Within Small Businesses--Practitioners and professionals in applied sciences have recognized that the growth of small businesses is a crucial determinant to the economy of the United States. However, scholars, organizational consultants, and publishers continually prefer to study organizational issues with middle or large size of organizations (May, 1997; Smith & Hoy, 1992), especially when testing is involved. Small businesses are categorized as organizations that have less than 100 employees (Heneman & Berkley, 1999). They are different from middle or large size of businesses not only due to the size but also due to their needs, management, and human resources strategies (Martin & Staines, 1994; Smith & Hoy, 1992). Due to the limited resources, small businesses rely on the interview for their personnel selection more heavily, and quite frequently solely, when dealing with recruitment, placement, performance evaluation, decision making, and problem solving (Heneman & Berkley, 1999). Eventually, their employees are exposed to different kinds of interviews at work. Small businesses were also reported to provide more frequent interpersonal contact with their workers, customers, and supervisors (Smith & Hoy, 2000), along with a high degree of job complexity and challenge. Unfortunately there always are problems and concerns in any organization. For small businesses, an organizational problem, when it occurs, is less likely to be tackled in a systematic, sophisticated, or timely manner due to their lack of resources, including manpower assistance, and the tight budgets (May, 1997; Martin & Staines, 1994). Procrastination is costly because employees' morale, work motivation, organizational commitment, productivity, and organizational growth suffer.

As defined by Bringle and Hatcher (1996) service learning is a process in which students are allowed to participate in organized service activities that meet identified community needs. Thus, service learning should provide a strong link between course content of a specific discipline and civic responsibility. Through this definition and guidelines, service learning has several major features: it involves a structured process, it has explicit goals, and it requires assessment so that participants, including community, students, and faculty can be evaluated based on the pre-set criteria. Finally, it presents concrete outcomes and benefits for all parties that participated in the process. The following service learning project was designed to carefully and flexibly implement the above principles, guidelines, and goals through a practice that involved small businesses in a suburban community in West Virginia.

Goals set for this project consisted of three facets. First, for students this project was designed to enhance their academic skills in interviewing, statistics, data analysis, presentation, and consulting through a realistic work setting. It was expected that students would practice how to identify organizational problems, improve their communication and writing skills, gain knowledge of organizational needs, and better understand the complexity of employees' job attitudes. Second, for participating small businesses this project would produce information about employees' concerns including suggestions, positive and negative feedback of the organization through a systematic and standardized method, data collection, statistical analysis, and quality presentation as to findings. Third, for the instructor this project would build a good relationship between the institution and the organization and provide opportunities for the future services upon mutual interests and needs.

Method

The instructor first contacted the local Chamber of Commerce to locate a list of organizational names and persons to contact regarding businesses with less than 50 employees in the community. After several discussions four small businesses, health insurance, janitorial work, assisted residence, and home improvement, confirmed their interests. It was expected to have more than 130 employees contribute to this project. Participants were scheduled individually to finish the study during their work hours. They were informed that supervisors and managers would receive a formal presentation with summarized findings in the end but data would be collected anonymously. It was guaranteed that no information about an individual would be provided to the company/business. During the study, each employee was requested to fill out a Job Descriptive Index (JDI), followed by a structured and standardized face-to-face interview, and finally complete the same JDI again. The process lasted for approximately 45 minutes. For their cooperation, each participant received an ink pen printed with names of the academic institution and West Virginia Campus Compact, the grant provider who supported this study.

Eight graduate and undergraduate students acted as facilitators to collect data from the JDI and interview. These students were taking either "Introduction to Industrial/Organizational Psychology" or "Seminar in Organizational Behavior" with the instructor and volunteered to be involved in the study. They were rewarded $.35 per mile they traveled. Outside class hours, they also received several training sessions conducted by the instructor. During the training, they learned about the purpose, importance, and requirements of objectivity and standardization, and their role during the study. They were instructed to write down employees' answers and pay close attention to detail as objectively as possible. They practiced interviewing skills through a paired role-playing activity. Students were also responsible for scheduling a meeting with each employee separately. If they preferred, the study could be completed off site, for instance at a restaurant as agreed by their manager and the instructor. Ideally each facilitator would only work with a small number of employees; in the end, no students performed more than 19 surveys. Following data collection, all of the students received training in how to code, enter, analyze, and interpret quantitative data received from the JDI with SPSS. Qualitative information from interviews, which had been designed to assist employees to better associate their jobs was not transferred to numeric code but grouped together as much as possible to guarantee anonymity. For instance, regarding the question "What is the best point working in this company?" the manager will hear that five employees mentioned "Location", three said "Customers", two said "Flexible work hours", and one did not answer.

Measurement

The Job Descriptive Index (JDI) designed by Smith, Kendall, and Hulin in 1969 was used to assess employees' job satisfaction and five indexes, including their perceptions of pay (9 items), coworker (18 items), work environment (18 items), supervision (18 items), and opportunities for promotion (9 items). The JDI is one of most popular instrument of job satisfaction (Bowling Green, 1997; Judge & Church, 2000) with very high validity (Spector, 2002), reliability for all indexes of satisfaction around .90 (Johnson & Johnson, 2002), and test-retest reliability as .57 within 6 months (Schneider & Dachler, 1978). In addition to the JDI, 18 additional items were included in an interview. Five of these included demographic data, including employee's gender, age, work status (part- or full-time), years of employment at this organization, whether they have held the same position ("Yes" or "No"). The other 13 open-ended items inquired about the employee's descriptions of the job, interpersonal relationships with supervisors and co-workers, and promotion opportunities (as per Appendix). The researcher and student facilitators had verified wording and content before the study was initiated. This interview took around 20-25 minutes. Each facilitator had no prior contact with any employee.

Assessment

Each student's performance was assessed by the manager/owner, the student him/her self, and the instructor. After students have started the interviewing process and during the rest of the semester, the instructor contacted managers/owners of small businesses through phone several times inquiring about students' progress and the managers' satisfaction and concerns. None of them presented any problems or needs for improvement. They were all willing to allow students to proceed with what had been planned without interference. In the end of March the instructor e-mailed a feedback form with open-ended questions to students asking about their perceived problems, negative/positive comments of the project, suggestions for improvement, and concerns, if any. All of students felt positive. Many of them even suggested continually designing similar projects for classes. Two of them indicated this project helped them perceive how a theory was implemented. All students also finished two tests and one final examination with students who did not participate in the project.

Results

Each student gave an oral presentation to the owner or the manager of the small business regarding the major findings from his/her survey. In total, 80 employees completed this project. Among all participants, 13 employees worked part-time; the other 67 employees worked full time. There were 34 male employees and 45 female employees who completed this survey. One did not identify the gender. Most employees were younger than 40 years old (54.4%). About 78% of employees had been working with their companies for less than four years. The majority of employees (more than 69%) had held the same position since they were hired. Most of employees earned hourly wages and had frequent contacts with customers in their daily work. Both the home improvement (16 employees) and the health insurance (17 employees) got 100% of employees engaged in this study. The janitorial work (28 employees participated, 68%) and the assisted residence agency (18 employees participated, 90%) did not have a complete participation. Incomplete participation was due to that some employees did not want to be surveyed or some worked in a different branch office.

From correlation measures, all five dimensions (work environment, supervision, pay, opportunities for promotion, and coworker) were highly and positively correlated with job satisfaction before and after the interview. Before the interview, the median for job satisfaction for male workers was 19.00 (mean = 17.03, SD = 7.78, 95% confidence interval from 14.27 - 19.79); for female workers, the median was 13.00 (mean = 12.40, SD = 6.864, 95% confidence interval from 10.34 - 14.46). After the interview, the median for male workers was 19.00 (mean = 17.76, SD = 6.94, 95% confidence interval from 15.30 - 20.22); for female workers it was 13.00 (mean = 12.73, SD = 6.517, 95% confidence interval from 10.78 - 14.69). According to the norms for pay satisfaction described by Smith, Kendall, and Hulin (1969), the 50th percentile rank (median) for male workers was 30 and for female workers it was 28. This study then showed that pay satisfaction reported in this study was much lower than norms. Regardless of the interview, work was reported to have the highest correlation with job satisfaction (r = .812 before the interview and r = .830 after the interview) and supervision had the lowest correlation (r = .554 before the interview and r = .564 after the interview). Pay which was correlated with job satisfaction at r = .645 before the interview and r = .672 after the interview did not have the lowest correlation with job satisfaction, instead supervision did.

A Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was conducted to test the age effect over job satisfaction before and after the interview. The result showed that there was no age impact before interview (F(3, 78) = 2.201, p > .05) or after interview (F(3, 78) = 2.176, p > .05). Finally to be able to assess the stability of job satisfaction (Johnson & Johnson, 2000; Schneider & Dachler, 1978), a repeated-t measure was conducted. The result showed that there was a significant difference in job satisfaction before and after the interview (t(78) = -6.682, p <.05). In fact, the mean for job satisfaction increased after the structured interview. Before the interview, the mean was 152.42 and it increased to 159.12 after the interview. The interview questions were implemented to refresh employees' memory of their job. Whether the changed job satisfaction is caused by the structured interview effect is a subject for future investigation.

Conclusions

The outcome of this service-learning project was very positive and significant. Not only is there a clear demonstration of pedagogy and goals of service learning but the project also aligns well with academic learning and professional practice in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. One student in the end commented that "so this is what I/O psychologists will be doing". For students, skills, ability, and knowledge of testing, presentation, and problem solving are essential. In fact these are more effectively and efficiently demonstrated through a service learning project than by textbook chapters. Also the idea of service learning has proven to be one in which there is no conflict or concern in terms of risk and cost to organizations when they need assistance in human resources issues. Evidently the instructor has built up contact with companies in the community and created a path for students' future practicum or internship.

Nevertheless the instructor also experienced minor problems and difficulties during this project. Some unexpected work situations require flexibility and motivation for problem solving. For instance, not every employee wanted to participate. In this case, it is not clear how much this person is satisfied at his/her job. Not every employee can be reached on site. The project then allowed students to conduct phone interview for another six employees who actually were located 50 miles away at the branch office of the janitorial work company. Not many companies, even small businesses, welcome this type of service-learning project. The instructor approached more than 20 companies to retain four companies willing to collaborate. It is very difficult for the instructor to plan in the beginning of the semester on how many students, how much time actually needed, evaluation, and supporting facilities. Students also require traveling off campus. If this project had not been supported by a grant the instructor would have felt very vulnerable and inappropriate to ask students to commit so much outside class work especially most of them also worked either on a full time or part time basis. It is necessary to search for motivational factors that can immediately better serve students, faculty, and organizations when we are encouraging this type of project.

References

Bowling Green State University (1997). The job descriptive index. Retrieved on September 13, 2002, from http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/psych/JDI

Bringle, R. G. & Hatcher, J. A. (1996). Implementing service learning in higher education. Journal of Higher Education, 67(2), 221-239.

Heneman, H. G., & Berkley, R. A. (1999). Applicant attraction practices and outcomes among small businesses. Journal of Small Business Management, 37(1), 53-74.

Johnson G. J. & Johnson, w. r. (2000). Perceived over-qualification and dimensions of job satisfaction: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Psychology, 134(5), 537-556.

Judge, T. A., & Church, A. H. (2000). Job satisfaction: Research and practice. In C. L. Cooper, & E. A. Locke, E. A. Industrial and organizational psychology: Linking theory with practice. (pp. 166-198). Malden, MA: Blackwell Business.

Martin, G., & Staines, H. (1994). Managerial competences in small firms. Journal of Management Development, 13(7), 23-33.

May, K. E. (1997). Work in the 21st century: Understanding the needs of small businesses. Retrieved on September 16, 2002, from http://siop.org/tip/backissues/tipju197/may.html

Schneider, B. & Dachler, H. P. (1978). A note on the stability of the job descriptive index. Journal of Applied Psychology, 63(5), 650-653.

Smith, P. C., Kendall, I. M., Hulin, C. I. (1969). Measurement of satisfaction in work and retirement. Chicago: Rand McNally.

Smith, P. L., & Hoy, F. (1992). Job satisfaction and commitment of older workers in small businesses. Journal of Small Businesses Management, 30(4), 106-115.

Spector, P. E. (2002). Industrial organizational psychology: Research and practice. (3rd ed). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Appendix

01. How does the current position match with your career expectations?

02. How do you describe your job? (What did you do)?

03. What's the best point working in this company?

04. What is the worst point working in this company?

05. What will be your suggestion(s) for improvement/change of the above?

06. What do you think your supervisor will say about your suggestion(s)?

07. How do you describe your relationship with your supervisor?

08. Could you give me one specific event to describe the above?

09. How do you describe your relationship with your co-workers?

10. How supportive your company is in assisting you to get promoted?

11. If there is a chance for you to ask for a raise, what amount you'll ask? Why?

12. In your opinion, what can make this company more successful in terms of organizational growth?

13. In your opinion, what can the company do to increase employees' morale?

Grace Davis, Marshall University, WV

Grace Davis, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Industrial/Organizational Psychology program. Her research interests include organizational trust and work motivation.