What Do People Want From Their Jobs? A Dual Factor Analysis Based on Gender Differences

The main purpose of the paper is to identify what employees want from their jobs from the perspective of Herzberg’s’ two factor theory. The study wants to determine empirically the motivator-hygiene factors that have a significant impact on the overall level of Romanian employee job satisfaction using stepwise regression models, as well as to compare the existence of differences in the key dimensions of satisfaction according to workers' gender. The factor “work itself” was the most motivating aspect for Romanian employees while the least motivating aspect was “salary”. All of the job motivator and hygiene factors were moderately or substantially related to overall job satisfaction. The factors “working conditions,” “salary” and “achievement” explained the variability among Romanian employees’ overall level of job satisfaction. Furthermore, a gender analysis was conducted in order to identify if there are significant differences between men and women regarding the overall job satisfaction and the job factors resulted from the regression analysis. The empirical results of Mann-Whitney tests revealed that the gender characteristics were negligibly related to overall job satisfaction and also there are statistically significant differences between males and females about salary as one of factors that motivate employees.