Turner College Management Faculty Examine Impact of Workplace Politics on Job Satisfaction

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the latest data show that there are more than 10 million job openings in the U.S., but only 5.7 million unemployed workers.  According to a new study by Turner College researchers, this imbalance means that employee job satisfaction is an even more critical attitudinal variable in today’s workplace.  Recent research by the Turner College’s Robin Snipes, Jennifer Pitts and Phil Bryant, along with Tobias Huning of the University of North Florida (and formerly of the Turner College) and Alexandra Snipes of Emory University, asserts that job satisfaction is one of the most studied variables in the organizational behavior literature, mainly because researchers understand its impact on employee turnover and organizational effectiveness.  This understanding includes the notion that, although there are differences in how employees view and react to organizational politics that are, at least partly, based on individual differences, employees generally perceive workplace politics negatively.  The new study by Snipes et al., which was recently published by the Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, investigates the moderating effects of employee gender and age on the perceptions of organizational politics-job satisfaction relationship.  In doing so the study reports findings from a diverse group of 601 employees employed in more than a dozen organizations representing both the service and manufacturing sectors of the economy.  Results from statistical analysis of the data indicate that older employees are likely to be more negatively affected by perceptions of organizational politics than younger employees, and that political decisions affect the job satisfaction of female employees more negatively than male employees in certain circumstances.