Volume 14, Number 4 Article by Furqan Qamar and Talal Al Junaibi December, 2002
Does Nationality Affect Job Satisfaction? :
Job satisfaction and the factors that contribute to it are well-researched phenomena. Despite this, however, theories of job satisfaction are still not well perfected. Research in the field falls into five categories based on the causes of satisfaction they seek to establish: need fulfilment models, discrepancy models, value attainment models, equity models and trait component models. The last category includes studies that investigate the relationship between job satisfaction and the cultural and ethnic background of employees. Studies in this area report contradictory findings. Furqan Qamar and Talal Al Junaibi survey the literature and find that though several studies have been conducted in the context of multi-ethnic workforces in the US, very little work has been done in the Asian context.
The UAE is one of several countries in the capital rich but manpower-starved economies of the Middle East where almost all organisations — government or private, small, medium or large, manufacturing, trading or services — employ a multi cultural, multi racial, multi ethnic and multi national workforce. By examining job satisfaction in such a context, the authors believed, it would be possible to pinpoint attitudinal differences between employees belonging to different nationalities and ethnic groups. An exploratory study was therefore conducted through questionnaires personally administered to 360 respondents, the characteristic features of the sample largely matching with the workforce at the macro level in terms of age, gender and marital status, and including UAE nationals, Arabs, non-Arab Asians and other expatriates from all types and sizes of organisation. The 15 parameters for measuring job satisfaction fell into four subgroups: physical working conditions, qualitative work environment, rewards and interpersonal relationships. Although differences in job satisfaction on various parameters among workers of different nationalities were evident, the authors found, after controlling for age, gender, marital status, educational level and job experience, that nationality accounted for only 4% of the variations. This indicates that job satisfaction is more a function of intrinsic factors or met expectation than socio-cultural traits, ethnicity or national origin.
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