Revisiting Internal Marketing for the Determinants of Job (Dis)Satisfaction by Using Asymmetric Approach

Research in the fields of organizational behavior, human resources, or sustainable development management has paid much attention to employee job satisfaction and suggests it is critical to a firm obtaining a dominant position and gaining competitive advantage in a competitive environment. From the internal marketing perspective, how to satisfy employee job satisfaction to retain the valuable human resources needed to achieve sustainable development of the organization is a major concern of scholars and practitioners. However, most studies focus on above-average job satisfaction and relatively neglect below-average job satisfaction. Accordingly, this study categorized relevant antecedents into causal configurations for identifying the sufficient conditions of job (dis)satisfaction. Specifically, this study investigated how employees can achieve job satisfaction or dissatisfaction based on a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Most problems and theories of social science are formulated in terms of sets and set relations, while study employs asymmetric thinking in data analysis of previous linear relationships. The fsQCA found three and two causal configurations to be sufficient for high employee job satisfaction and dissatisfaction, respectively. For instance, the results indicate one configuration, namely task-related, innovation-related, coworker-related, and personal-related characteristics present but supervisor-related characteristics absent, can achieve high employee job satisfaction when the values of task-related, innovation-related, coworker-related, and personal-related characteristics are high with lower values of supervisor-related characteristics.