Job Satisfaction and Superintendency in Schools

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, a

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may find their job tenure short, and often serve as lightning rods for community controversies. They become symbols, and often scapegoats, replaced when communities or school boards cannot come to agreement about district policy or direction. For example, the school superintendent in Battle Ground, Washington (its actual name) was fired less than a month after a new school board was elected. He had become a major campaign issue during the election, during which candidates on one ticket had promised to get rid of him if elected. This, presumably, was seen as solving some of the problems of the school district which were blamed on the superintendent's personality and allegedly abrasive style (Clayton, 1997). This situation illustrates some of the problems related to job satisfaction for school superintendents. They are identified with their districts, schools, and programs to such an extent that any failures or problems within the district are frequently attributed to the superintendent, whether fairly or unfairly. In Beck's case, public perceptions of the district were perceived by school board members to have declined during his tenure. Thus, they preferred to buy out his contract for $160,000, rather than retain him in
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Approximate Word count = 2537
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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