Job Satisfaction of Behavioral Care Workers

In view of the unique pressures confronting behavioral care workers in mental health care provider organizations, the issue of job satisfaction and dissatisfaction among such workers becomes and especially important factor for such organizations. Patient care quality and continued organizational viability are dependent in great part on the perceptions of job satisfaction or dissatisfaction by behavioral care workers. Within the context of this issue, the following research question was investigated:

What is the relationship between employee productivity and employee perceptions of job satisfaction or dissatisfaction among behavioral care workers in private mental health provider organizations?

The findings of this study were that behavioral care workers in private mental health care provider organizations generally were satisfied with their jobs and that job satisfaction was positively related to the productivity of behavioral care workers. The study also found, however, that sources of potential job dissatisfaction does exist in these organizations and that management should address these issues before job dissatisfaction develops.

Behavioral care workers in mental health care provider organizations frequently are required to care for patients who are acutely psychotic, aggressive, highly destructive, suicidal, or

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Blegen, 1993). Some researchers have considered the effects of these factors separately, whereas others have summed or averaged them into a global measure. Other widely used measures of job satisfaction divide the construct into intrinsic and extrinsic components (Lambert & Lambert, 1993). Still others consider the construct only in a global context (Blegen, 1993). The pioneering work in the contemporary approach to job satisfaction research was performed by Smith, Kendall, and Hulin (1969). They postulated that job satisfaction is the product of work, pay, promotion, coworkers, and supervision and that each of these factors influences perceptions of job satisfaction. The Job Descriptive Index (JDI) has been used extensively to measure job satisfaction because of its relative simplicity (Brown & Peterson, 1993). Unfortunately, tests of the model frequently have found it wanting within the context of accuracy (Taber, 1991). The reason for the lack of accuracy in the use of the JDI appears to be that many researchers continue to attempt to measure job satisfaction by either summing or averaging the scores on the original five scales of the index in the face of an admonition from the instrument's creators to avoid such use
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 4177
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)

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