In exploring the literature on job satisfaction for school superintendents, there was little available in the literature. Instead, the focus seemed to be on how school superintendents and school administrators needed to satisfy everyone else, including all their major constituencies of students, teachers, staff, and community members. This might be a clue about the state of job satisfaction of school superintendents. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that it is a high-risk job, with large cities having difficulty filling the position, and tenures of school superintendents often being short, fraught with controversy, and the source of legal battles and civil settlements. The intention in the following pages is to look at some of the general issues of job satisfaction and then look more specifically at the state of the school superintendency in relationship to traditional measures of job satisfaction.
A brief introduction to the job satisfaction literature might be helpful. According to Robbins (1996), job satisfaction is essentially a general attitude that employees take toward their job. Robbins indicated that this is based primarily as the worker's view of the difference between the amount of rewards they receive and the amount that they should receive. These rewards are not limited to salary, but can include such things as the way employees are treated and valued by management, and the degree to which the company takes their input into consideration.
The job satisfaction literature tends to indicate that high job satisfaction is related to increased morale, decreased absenteeism and turnover and improved employee relations. Some of the major variables which determine job satisfaction include such things as mentally challenging work, equitable rewards, good working conditions, supportive managers and supportive colleagues (Katzell et al., 1992).
In looking at the issue of mentally challenging work, this is no...