Job Satisfaction, Work Environment and Relations with Managers in Britain

Little empirical work has been done on the relationship of job satisfaction to work environment and the managerial attitudes towards employees. Employees’ well being is important to the firm. Analysis of job satisfaction may give insight into various aspect of labor market behavior, such as worker productivity, absenteeism and job turn over. This paper investigates the relationship of worker satisfaction, to the work environment and the worker relationship to managers. We use a unique data of 28 240 British employees, Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS97). In this data set the employee questionnaire is matched with the employer questionnaire. Four measures of job satisfaction are negatively related to the establishment size. Establishment size in return is related to the degree of flexibility in the work environment and the relationship with the supervisors. We find that, contrary to the previous results lower levels of job satisfaction in larger establishments can not necessarily be attributed to the inflexibility in the work environment. However, the weak employee-manager relationships may be a major source of the observed lower levels of job satisfaction in larger establishments.