Factors that Affect the Satisfaction of Employees in Ghana's Public Sector

Abstract

The formal definition of job satisfaction could be traced back to the studies of Fisher and Hanna in the year 1931. Based on
amounts of case studies, they described job satisfaction as a product of non-regulatory mood tendency. In the year 1974,
Churchill et al. published an article called Measuring the Job Satisfaction of Industrial Salesmen and made it clear that job
satisfaction, as a constitutional concept, contains the features of the job and the features of job-related environment. In a
positive measurement of the constitutional concept of job satisfaction, Churchill et al. gave its operational definition i.e. the
work-related affection states covering five aspects namely the supervisors, jobs, work colleagues, compensation and
promotion opportunities.
In summary, regardless the researchers study, the concept of job satisfaction from which perspectives their definitions of job
satisfaction are derived are more or less about personal affections. If the employees have positive and pleasant feelings in
work, their attitudes to the work will be defined as job satisfaction. Otherwise, if the employees have negative and
unpleasant feelings in work, their attitudes to the work will be defined as unsatisfied (Yuewei Chen, 2012). In a nutshell, for
the researches on job satisfaction, scholars presented different opinions from various perspectives. The development of
defining job satisfaction follows a line from one single perspective to multiple perspectives.