Quality Of Work Life And Job Satisfaction Among Teacher Using Pls-Sem Approach

Abstract

Quality of work life (QWL) is one of the backgrounds of the organization development and it influence job satisfaction. QWL is important for employees’ as well as it is necessary for organisation to achieve the growth and profitability in the market. Since study of quality of work life is capturing many researches nowadays, this paper aim at investigating the association of quality of work life and job satisfaction of teacher in cluster school in East Coast region in Malaysia. This study use quantitative method. Data of 220 respondents is analyzed using Partial least square (PLS) 3.0. Based from the convergent and discriminant validity, the measurement model is acceptable as it fits the criteria. Cronbach alpha ranged from 0.771 to 0.903, which shows that all variable are acceptable. The interaction of quality of work life and job satisfaction among school teacher is a topic worthy for future research and discussion since teacher play a critical role in our society and factors that influences their satisfaction and efficiency are important.

Keywords: Quality of work lifejob satisfactionteacherPLS-SEM

Introduction

The Malaysian government in 1990s has revealed its Visions 2020, to direct the country towards achieving the status of an industrialized country by the year 2020 (Mahathir, 1991). Education has undoubtedly played an important role in developing the workers required to achieve the vision. This is one of the reasons why it is crucial to identify factors that can affect teaching profession as one of the key factors that will affect their satisfaction is the quality of working life (Darling-Hammond, 2003). The quality of working life is undoubtedly vital to attract and retain employees and it is important for an organization’s success. Hence, in the last two decades due to increased demand for business environment and family structure today has become critical (Akdere, 2006). Improved work life quality can have a great influence on workers’ interest, job satisfaction, retention, and firm performance (Surolia&Rai, 2015).

The attendance of workers is considered to be the quality of working life as a favourable condition in the workplace that minimizes the unexpected turnaround and unpredictable employee satisfaction by ensuring the proper reward, the true turn of the job is intended by the quality of working life (May, Lau & Johnson, 1999). Roodt, Rieger and Sempane (2002) defined job satisfaction as a person's assessment of his work on matters and concerns that are important to them, and the sentiments and emotions involved will have a big impact on the attitude of this person. The quality of working life can help in encouraging employees in making them balance between professional, personal and social life and ultimately increases the satisfaction and commitment of employees’ work which ultimately leads to the development of the entire educational institution.

Problem Statement

Ministry of Education has introduced School-Based Assessment (SBA) to survey student accomplishment as it aims at identifying individual potential towards creating astonishing human capital that is consistent with National Education Philosophy. The Minister of Education, contended that SBA will give student the chance to upgrade their own particular potential and turn out to be more inventive and imaginative with the consistent help of teacher (Ministry of Education Malaysia, 2012).

When SBA was introduced by the Ministry of Education in public schools five years ago, the new system actually killed teachers' spirit for their profession and affected their personal lives since they were disappointed with the implementation. This is because teachers need to enter student data as required by SBA. With this additional burden, teachers felt disappointed and exhausted as they have to juggle with the system apart from the normal teaching and administrative workload, thus affecting the quality of their working life and their satisfaction with their work (Fatehi, Karimi, Pour & Azizi, 2015; Mehta, 2015; Muindi & K’Obonyo, 2015).

Therefore, in achieving world-class standards the findings of this study will focus on ways to improve the quality of teaching and learning that can help the Malaysian higher education system. Understanding of the association of work life quality and job satisfaction is believed to be contributed by the study (Parveen, Maimani, & Kassim, 2017). The finding is expected to assist the government in adapting new policies towards teachers and this can benefit the education stream in implementing a new education policy. The relevant school administrators will also be able to enhance the education system quality in school

Research Questions

This study aim at answering the main research question on interaction of QWL with job satisfaction and proposed to answer several research question on QWL antecedents for example the relationship between job involvement, work role conflict, work time, family involvement, family conflict and spouse/partner support with job satisfaction?

Purpose of the Study

Benefits can be given to organizations that establish the interactions between work quality and job satisfaction, as management can place human resource practices that can help in improving the teacher QWL and induce job satisfaction among them and consequently positively influence teacher commitment to the organization. Moreover, the ultimate goal in every organization and people working for the organization can improve the working life quality. There seems to be an urgent need to increase the quality of life for many workers working in an organization. In addition, 65 percent of human life is spent at workplace and a non-financial reward is now increased, especially among employees with higher education background (Salmani, 2003).

Research Methods

Overall, 300 questionnaires were distributed to teachers in cluster school (A rank) in East Coast of Malaysia but only 220 questionnaires were usable. Teacher in clusters schools is selected as the sample of this study since education success is depending on the commitment of the employees. Thus, teachers are the essential compelling power of education and the consideration of working atmosphere are one of the essential element of education (Zulfiqar & Saadi, 2009). The total number of questionnaire which were completed and returned are 220 with the response rate of 81.48 % and considered acceptable (Hair, 2010). Cluster sampling technique is employed in this study.

Findings

Measurement model

The research model employed the smart PLS 3.0 approach. Based on the two stages analytical procedures by Anderson and Gerbing (1988), the measurement and structural model were measured. In addition, Stastical packages for Social Science version 22 was employed in data importing and analysis of descriptive statistics. The path coefficients and the loadings and a bootstrapping method (500 re-samples) were employed to determine the significance levels.

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Data reliability for this study is measure using composite reliability (CR) and Cronbach alpha. CR is test to gauge the data internal consistency, CR value stretched between 0.836 to 0.918 which is greater than the suggested value of 0.7 (Hair, 2007). This demonstrated high internal consistency and reliability in all constructs. Cronbach alpha is known as the most familiar method applied to measure reliability (Sekaran, 2003). Cronbach alpha value less than 0.60 indicate lack of reliability (Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, & Tatham, 2006) while any value ranged from 0.771 to 0.903 indicated that all variables are acceptable.

Data validity is measures using convergent and discriminant validity. To measure convergent validity, each latent variable AVE should be more than 0.5 (Hair, Sarstedt, Pieper, & Ringle, 2012). From the Table 02 the result shows that all variable AVE is range from 0.166 to 0.879, some of the AVE result are less than 0.5, however, all the value of AVE is accepted as according to Fornell and Lacker’s (1981) even though AVE is fewer than 0.5 but if CR is greater than 0.6, the convergent validity of the construct is acceptable.

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Next, discriminant validity is tested, it is done to test how much it correlates with other constructs. Fornell and Larcker (1981) method is adopted to confirm discriminant validity as in Table 03 above. According to Fornell and Larcker, the square root of AVE must value more than the correlations values in the row or column. Therefore, it can be concluded that the measurement model is accepted since it fulfil the criteria of convergent and discriminant validity.

Next is the structural model (inner model) analysis. In this phase, the path coefficient were determined (Hair Jr, Hult, Ringle, & Sarstedt, 2016). Figure 1 below are the path analysis for the measurement model.

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Path coefficient denotes the strength and route of the relationship between variables. Positive path coefficient indicating a positive influence and vice versa (Huang, Wang, Wu, & Wang, 2013). Table 04 below shows the path coefficient of each attributes.

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Next, for better understanding of structural model, bootstrapping (500 samples) was utilized to create t-statistics value that enable the researcher to measure the statistical implication of the path coefficients. Table 05 below demonstrated outcome of t-statistics analysis using bootstrapping.

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Based on the result, only H1 is accepted as the t-value is significant at p<0.05. The result is similar with previous findings (Ha-Young, 2009; Hafer & Martin, 2006; Macky & Boxall, 2008) H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 are rejected, however, even though the hypotheses are rejected, it is still aligned with previous findings. H2 is similar with findings from Lui, Ngo, and Wing-Ngar Tsang (2001) where they discovered that work-family conflict is significantly but adversely associated with job satisfaction. H3 is supported by Jorge and Heloísa (2006) where working hours is adversely related with job satisfaction since employees’ satisfaction is decreased with prolong working hours. Next, H4 it is also tailored with previous findings from Calvo-Salguero, Carrasco-Gonzalez, and De Lecea (2010), when work role interferes with the performance of the family involvement, there should be a negative assessment of work. H5 is similar with findings by Lu, Kao, Chang, Wu, and Cooper (2008), Bhuian, Menguc and Borsboom (2005) where it shows that work-family conflict is negatively associated with job satisfaction. Lastly for H6, Ilies, Wilson and Wagner (2009) confirmed that job satisfaction influences not only what employees experience in their family roles but also what their spouses or significant with others observe.

Conclusion

The interaction between quality of work life and job satisfaction among teacher is a topic that a worthy for the further research and discussion. This research design can be replicated with different teaching populations to determine under which circumstances on how teacher overall satisfaction of their teaching experience could be effected. This is because, teacher is a professional, that play a critical role in our society and future investigations that clarify elements influencing their satisfaction and efficacy could not be of greater importance.

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