تاثیر وقایع زندگی بر رضایت شغلی

Employing fixed effects regression techniques on longitudinal data, we investigate how life events affect employees' job satisfaction. Unlike previous work–life research, exploring mostly contemporaneous correlations, we look for evidence of adaptation in the years following major life events. We find evidence of adaptation following the first marriage event, but we find that the birth of the first child has a long-lasting impact on employees' job satisfaction. Our findings also suggest that there is a general boost in job satisfaction prior to first marriage and to a lesser extent prior to the birth of the first child, consistent with evidence of anticipation. Accordingly, our study provides some of the first evidence on the dynamic effect of non-work related factors on job satisfaction and it introduces a novel methodology and a new perspective for investigating the dynamic interaction between the work and life domains.

A large literature in social sciences and management has linked employees' job satisfaction to observable workplace behaviors, including absenteeism, organizational commitment, productivity, and quits (Clark et al., 1998, Judge et al., 2001, Schleicher et al., 2004 and Scott and Taylor, 1985). It is thus not surprising that numerous studies emphasize the importance of identifying the determinants of job satisfaction, exploring both work and non-work related factors. Earnings, working hours, working environment, workplace socialization, autonomy, organizational control, and participation in training schemes are all work-related factors shown to be affecting job satisfaction (Agho et al., 1993, Arthur et al., 2003 and Georgellis and Lange, 2007). Studies exploring non-work related factors affecting well-being at work focus mainly on personality, disposition, and work–life conflict arguments (Dormann and Zapf, 2001, Eby et al., 2005 and Eby et al., 2010). Largely, these studies rely on small samples, indirect comparisons, and data of a contemporaneous nature rather than direct, causal examinations over time (Lambert, 1991 and Tenbrunsel et al., 1995). Evidence on the direct, dynamic impact of life events on workers' well-being is virtually non-existent, partially because of a lack of suitable longitudinal data. In another strand of the literature, empirical studies have recently utilized large-scale longitudinal data to test psychological theories of adaptation and have generated a resurgent interest in dynamic aspects of human behavior and well-being (Clark et al., 2008 and Lucas et al., 2003). By tracking individuals' self-reported life satisfaction scores before and after important events, Clark et al. (2008) find evidence of rapid adaptation to a baseline level of well-being, which is predetermined by fixed personality traits. More specifically, their findings offer support for the adaptation hypothesis for most events par unemployment. Regarding adaptation to marriage, their evidence suggests a positive, yet transitory effect on well-being around the time of the event, with evidence of a rapid adaptation back to baseline, within 2 years after the event. Regarding the birth of the first child, they also find evidence of a negative well-being effect, which, for women at least, takes longer than 2 years to return to its baseline level. Motivated by these recent developments in the empirical literature on testing psychological theories of adaptation, our aim in this study is to investigate how major life events, such as first marriage and the birth of the first child, affect employees' job satisfaction. Although these events are likely to be contemporaneously correlated with job satisfaction, whether their effect on job satisfaction is positive or negative remains an empirical question. One possible scenario is that these events shift individuals' priorities from achieving career goals towards a more fulfilling family life, often resulting in a specialization and a reallocation of spouses' time and other household resources from market work towards home production. Such a diversion of resources away from work could have a negative impact on job satisfaction. If, on the other hand, marriage and children enhance individuals' time management skills or facilitate the efficient use of resources, then their effect on job satisfaction will be a positive one. However, should employees be predisposed to adapt to changing circumstances, the research question arises as to whether job satisfaction in the years following the event returns rapidly back towards baseline levels. Similarly, as the shift in priorities and the process of reallocation of household resources is often initiated prior to marriage and childbirth, a related question is whether employees anticipate the effect that such major life events will have on their job satisfaction. To offer some answers to these questions, we test for evidence of adaptation and anticipation in job satisfaction employing fixed effects regression techniques on data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The BHPS is a large-scale longitudinal survey, which allows us to track employees' job satisfaction before and after the events. Unlike previous studies, which focus mostly on contemporaneous correlations, the use of the BHPS data and the longitudinal design in this study allows us to tease out the causal relationship between life events and job satisfaction. Following Clark et al. (2008), we test for adaptation to first marriage by including a set of dummy variables in the job satisfaction regressions capturing the elapsed duration of marriage at each interview point since the time that the event occurred. If all the estimated coefficients of the elapsed duration dummy variables are roughly the same then there is no evidence of adaptation. If on the other hand the coefficients of more distant marriage in the past are smaller than the coefficients of more recent marriage then this is evidence of adaptation. To test for anticipation, we include a series of lead dummy variables capturing the time until the event occurs (will marry in the next 12 months, in the next 1–2 years etc.), as in Clark et al. (2008). Controlling for a fixed effect in this case ensures that the leads dummy variables pick up anticipation effects instead of selection effects, whereby fixed unobserved individual characteristics (e.g. personality or ability) are associated with higher job satisfaction and a higher probability of getting married. We apply the same procedure to examine how employees' job satisfaction reacts to the birth of the first child and to test for adaptation and anticipation effects. Accordingly, the study offers some of the first evidence on the dynamic effect of non-work related factors on job satisfaction and on the link between the work and life domains. Taken together with previous findings on the effect of marriage and children on life satisfaction, our study introduces a novel perspective on the work–life conflict and work–life enrichment debates.

In this study, we have explored how two important life events such as first marriage and the birth of the first child affect employees' job satisfaction. Using large-scale longitudinal data, we found evidence of a contemporaneous correlation between these events and job satisfaction, which is consistent with previous findings in the literature. However, the use of longitudinal data allowed us to add a new dimension to the existing literature by focusing on dynamic aspects of the relationship between life events and job satisfaction and the interaction between the work and life domains. Inspired by a recent revival of adaptation level theory and its implication for well-being at work and workplace behavior, we looked for evidence of adaptation of job satisfaction in the years following first marriage and the birth of the first child. Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, our findings suggest that the birth of the first child has a more salient and more long-lasting impact on how employees feel about their jobs than first marriage does. In this respect, the birth of the first child could be considered a ‘life changing event’, or to be more precise ‘a working life changing event’, which signals a long-term commitment of financial and emotional resources by working parents. While previous studies have found evidence of adaptation back to baseline levels of satisfaction with life overall following the birth of a child, in this study we find little evidence of adaptation when focusing on job satisfaction instead. The use of longitudinal data allowed us also to test for evidence of anticipation. Our results show that there is a general boost in job satisfaction prior to first marriage, consistent with evidence of anticipation, but there is only weak evidence of anticipation in the case of the birth of a child, with the exception of the job satisfaction of females in the private sector. Taken together, our findings on adaptation and anticipation paint a picture of a dynamic behavioral response of job satisfaction to the two main life events, which is consistent with the predictions of adaptation level theory as well as a dynamic interaction of the work and life domains before and after the events. Both marriage and the birth of a child are generally viewed as positive life events, which boost overall life satisfaction, albeit temporarily. Thus, we could attribute any positive boost of job satisfaction around the time of the event to potential spillover effects from the life to the work domain, whereby happiness at home boosts happiness at work. However, as the process of adaptation towards pre-event levels of life satisfaction gathers speed in the years following the event, work–life conflict considerations start to dominate employees' perceptions, attitudes, and behavioral workplace responses, changing the nature of the relationship between job satisfaction and life events from a positive to a negative one. Exploring the dynamic nature of the interaction between the work and life domains has been generally ignored in the previous literature. Most of the previous work on how non-work related factors affect employees' perceptions, values, and attitudes towards work draws on indirect comparisons of mostly contemporaneous correlations. Our study offers some of the first evidence on the dynamic nature of the relationship between life events and job satisfaction. It also advocates the use of a novel methodology, adapted from Clark et al. (2008), for testing for both adaptation and anticipation. A main advantage of this methodology is that it also controls for individual fixed effects, thus allowing to disentangle anticipation and adaptation effects from possible selection effects, whereby employees who report high job satisfaction scores are more likely to marry and less likely to leave their marriage early. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that although the fixed effects analysis exploits the within subject variance in the data, there is still the possibility of potential bias due to unobserved time-variant variables. While we have included a large number of controls in our analysis to capture time-varying heterogeneity, the potential of bias due to unobserved time-varying heterogeneity needs to be addressed in future work. Another limitation of our study is the use of the BHPS data, collected during interviews contacted approximately a year apart. This allows us to take into account only the year that the event happened rather than the exact date. Frijters, Johnston, and Shields (2011) have applied the same methodology to test for anticipation, adaptation, and selection effects in the Australian labor market, using quarterly instead of yearly data, which improves the reliability of the findings. We believe that the use of a higher frequency data in future work will provide a more accurate picture of the dynamic nature of the relationship between life events and job satisfaction. The use of higher frequency data will also help to control for the potential concurrent effect of multiple events. For example, changes in marital status are often associated with other important changes such as changes in income, residence, job, and occupation, among others. Although we control for some of these variables in our analysis, the use of monthly or quarterly data could certainly offer a way forward in future work for capturing events and changing circumstances that individuals adapt rapidly to and in very short periods. Finally, although our focus on first marriage and birth of the first child limits the scope of the present study, it has allowed us to offer a platform and a research methodology for a future research agenda to investigate the dynamic impact of a broader range of events on well-being at work. Widening the scope of future work–life research in this direction will provide valuable insight into the design and evaluation of human resource management policies to address work–life balance issues in the workplace, which they have relied heavily on cross-sectional analyses (e.g. Grover & Crooker, 1995).