Business Employees/Individual Contributors/Members/Adults
OBJECTIVE This applied dissertation was designed to identify the key factors that contribute to employees’ morale in the workplace, job satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and retention, and to identify the possible relationship between morale and the leadership practices of a core group of professionals.
METHODOLOGY The target population for the study initially included all 30 employees who composed a core group of professionals who were full-time state workers in four work units, identified as A, B, C, and D, in an State Department of Education located in a metropolitan area on the east coast of the United States. The final sample did not include this whole target population because participation in the study was strictly voluntary. Twenty-five individuals participated in the study by completing a confidential survey which included the Leadership Practices Inventory (Self), the Job Diagnostic Survey (Hackman & Oldham, 1975), Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (Mowday, Steers, & Porter, 1979), and a series of open-ended questions. There were slightly more men (52.0%) than women, ages ranged from 31-35 years to 51 or over, with a median age of 45.5 years, about three quarters had been with the organization between 6 and 13 years, and all had at least a master’s degree (five had a doctorate). Internal reliability for the five leadership practices in this study ranged between .67 and .86.
KEY FINDINGS Responses on the LPI were not related to any demographic characteristic of the respondent. Job satisfaction was significantly correlated with Challenging the Process and organizational commitment was correlated with Modeling the Way.