Abstract

This study explored the level of job satisfaction among private and public primary school teachers of Bangladesh. Data have been collected randomly from 40 primary school teachers of Bogra district in Bangladesh through a structured questionnaire in February to March 2011. Among the respondents, 50% is government primary school teachers while 50% is private primary school teachers. Brayfield and Rothe (1951) method was used to determine the job satisfaction of the primary school teachers. Likert scale was used for measuring the attitude of the primary school teachers on their job. This research revealed that there was no significant difference between the job satisfaction of government and private primary school teachers. It also showed that female teachers are more satisfied than male teachers. The study suggests that an effective policy on the compensation package, promotional opportunities, end service benefits should be ensured by the government to improve the job satisfaction and attitude of primary school teachers irrespective of public and private primary school.

1. Introduction

A successful education system requires a group of high-quality teachers. So it is a primary requirement to recruit and train high-quality teachers for education to build an educated nation. One of the major factors of an education system is job satisfaction of teachers. Ostroff ¹ found that job satisfaction was highly linked with organizational commitment as well as to organizational performance. Primary academic institutions are academic companies which help to bring desirable changes in students’ knowledge, attitude, skill, and action. So, it is essential to handle human resources successfully for the achievements of the main goal of the school through finding its teachers are pleased or not.

Job satisfaction among the workers in every company is an essential issue as it is favorably related to its goal accomplishment. Job satisfaction is a set of positive or undesirable feeling and feelings with which workers view their work and the managers need to be aware of employees’ job satisfaction level ². Hackman and Oldham ³ reported five core job dimensions in their job characteristic model for determining employee’s motivation potential such as skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback. Appelbaum ⁴ found the correlation between the nature of job design and job satisfaction of workers. The job designs were task complexity, task variety, task interdependence etc. The job satisfaction of employees has a strong relationship with transparency and purposes of work ⁵.

Locke (1976) defined job satisfaction as enjoyable or beneficial psychological condition, causing from the evaluation of one’s job encounters. In most research job satisfaction is described as how individuals experience about their tasks and its different aspects. It is a collection of feelings that an individual holds toward his or her job ^{6, 7}. Mobey and Lockey reported as an opinion that “job satisfaction and dissatisfaction are a function of the perceived relationship between what one expects and obtain from one’s job and how much importance or value one attributes to it” ⁸. It leads to recognition, income, promotion, and the achievement of other goals that lead to a general feeling of satisfaction. Bullock defined it as an attitude which outcomes from a controlling and summary of many particular prefers and hate knowledgeable associated with the job ⁹. The importance of main university teachers’ job satisfaction should not be belittled in any way. A nation’s institutional knowledge begins from main university success of which relies upon on its teachers’ level of job satisfaction. The quality, as well as a volume of the efficiency of a pleased instructor, is much better than that of a disappointed one. Consequently, for the improvement of the main knowledge of the nation, job satisfaction must be ensured.

The outlined subject is a very serious issue due to the importance of main knowledge, which is the basis stage of the whole chart of knowledge and learning system on the globe. Thus, the role performed by main university instructors informing the upcoming creation of any nation is tremendous. Traditionally, the high-quality instructors and knowledge in any nation around the globe have been a significant part of different cultures. So, the level of satisfaction of instructors towards their job is very important to research. A better performance from an instructor can only be expected if they have suggested with their job. It is highly easy to understand that a poor settlement package will only motivate rather less qualified instructors into this career and as a result of which the possibilities of a well-educated upcoming creation will be affected. These days, people main university instructors in Bangladesh have been going through various problems. Job discontentment of the teachers is one of them. From the freedom of Bangladesh to until now, probably no research has been performed in this area. As a first research, it has got a tremendous importance. policy formulators and top level management will have ideas with regards to various aspects of job satisfaction of people main university instructors. Results of this research will help them to take appropriate actions to boost the overall job satisfaction levels of people main university instructors in Bangladesh.

The main objective of this study was to determine the level of job satisfaction among the public and private primary school teachers of Bangladesh. The main objectives split into the followings:

a) To explore the relationship of primary school teachers’ level of job satisfaction with their socio-economic, demographic, and educational status.

b) To determine the variation of job satisfaction between the public and private primary school teachers of Bangladesh.

c) To suggest some policy measures for improving primary school teachers’ job satisfaction.

The null hypothesis was that there was no difference in the level of job satisfaction between the public and private primary school teachers of Bangladesh.

2. Literature Related to Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction has been commonly analyzed over the last 40 years of business research. Saba et al. ¹⁰ found that all the factors such as business policy and strategy, characteristics of work, interaction, job stress, employees character and employment and selection techniques have a significant connection to workers job satisfaction.

Shaukat et al. ¹² examined that supply of assistance at work and higher leader-member return interaction positively forecasts workers job satisfaction. It shows that when the organization provides assistance to its workers or when a manager is helpful and workers have excellent return regards with their manager, they reciprocate it with higher interaction and increase job satisfaction.

Jehanzeb et al. ¹³ mentioned that a level of benefits, inspiration and job satisfaction of workers has a powerful connection in the financial industry of Saudi Arabic further it has been found that workers in the financial industry give more significance to financial or financial rewards. Rahman et al. ¹⁴ reported that the female workers overall job satisfaction of private financial institutions are associated with adequate remuneration for perform, available chance for promotion, job evaluated rewards, recognition for great perform, pleased supply wage rise, pleased supply wage rise, pleased incentive, and benefits, wage increases on performance, motivated in operating pleased available chance, training program regularly, pleased space available, pleased environment. The overall satisfaction of women workers of private commercial financial institutions can achieve if these factors are considered carefully. Hoque et al. ¹⁵ mentioned that the factors of job satisfaction such as job position, wage edge benefits, job security, special offers, workplace, job independence, identification for great work, co-workers, and monitoring have been allocated by both the degree of professionals, younger and top stage as the major factors of their specific job satisfaction. It is also said each of their factors has important positive regards with the overall job satisfaction of the professionals. Therefore, improve in values/standard of each of these factors would definitely improve the degree of job satisfaction of the chosen professionals.

Saner and Eyupoglu ¹⁶ tried to provide scientific evidence to establish whether gender differences exists with regards to the job satisfaction of men and women university teachers in Turkish Colleges. They found that women employees have an advanced level of job satisfaction.

Recently Syed et al. ¹⁷ performed a research on Job Satisfaction of Staff Members of Universities and Colleges in Pakistan’ and said in educating career, satisfied instructors are important forecaster students, educational institutions as well as the whole nation.

Ali et al. ¹⁸ discovered that satisfaction or discontentment among the workers in the job causes failing or success of any program or company. This study also revealed that quality knowledge and human development is only possible if the people associated with the program are pleased with their work. Haque and Taher ¹⁹ analyzed the ability of different primary job features to impact the levels of job satisfaction in regards to sex, marriage position, and age in perspective to Bangladesh. Sarker and Uddin ²⁰ found that teachers’ age and job encounter do not have any important impact on job satisfaction though sex differences were powerful among their reactions. Rahman et al. ²¹ revealed that there was a significant difference between public and private university teachers regarding job satisfaction on different factors. Nawaz and Rahman ²² revealed that salary, job security, promotional opportunity, proper guidance, and workplace were more important than recognition for great perform, independence of the task, fringe benefit, job status, open communication, extra time, operating hours for their overall job satisfaction. Islam and Hasan found that job satisfaction is related to the external factors such as working hours, edge benefits, job security, and identification for complicated work, wage, and good interaction with co-workers, job position, operating conditions, and contribution in making decisions, office management, and open interaction. Job satisfaction of instructors is too important because their mindset towards job customize the learning process of the learners ²³.

Job satisfaction is said to be lower among primary school instructors who educate relatively bigger categories or sessions from different social background scenes ²⁴. Mhozya ²⁵ conducted a research on job satisfaction of primary school teachers’ in Botswana and found that a significant number of instructors were not enthusiastic about the wage as opposed to the amount of work. Pearson and Seiler ²⁶ disclosed that academicians were satisfied with their working environment but dissatisfied with the compensation package. Perie and Baker reported a non-significant relationship between salary and benefits of primary school teachers’ job satisfaction in the United States ²⁷. Sargent and Hannum found that salaries and incentives did not have a significant effect on primary school teachers’ job satisfaction in China ²⁸. Mahmood conducted research on secondary school teachers and found female teachers were significantly more satisfied than male secondary school teachers ²⁹.

Ali et al. ¹⁸ revealed that female faculty members are more satisfied compared to male faculty members. Female teachers have higher job satisfaction than male teachers ³⁰. In contrast, female teachers were less satisfied with their jobs than male teachers ³¹. However, the study of Gosnell found no relationship between gender and teachers’ job satisfaction ³². However, he reported a negative relationship between the length of service and teachers’ job satisfaction. Poppleton and Risborough ³³ suggested that teachers who have less than five years of service are most satisfied than those who have been between 15 and 20 years of teaching. There was a significant negative relationship between teacher’ academic qualifications and job satisfaction ²⁸. Results of above studies have indicated that less qualified teachers were highly satisfied with jobs than high qualified teachers. But Avery reported that academic qualifications have no significant impact on teachers’ job satisfaction ³⁴.

So, the management of human resources especially primary school teachers becomes very crucial. Since almost no research has been done on the primary school teachers’ job satisfaction in the study area, this piece of the study was taken up to the satisfaction of the literature gap and improvement of the level of satisfaction of primary school teachers in Bangladesh.

3. Methodology

The research data have been collected from both primary and secondary sources. Primary data have been collected through a structured questionnaire from Bogra district of Bangladesh in January to February 2011. The data was collected using a well-designed interview schedule. All the variables were measured using a five-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagrees to strongly agree. In addition, different national and international articles and websites were researched for a quality work. Job satisfaction of the public and private primary school teachers was measured by the scale developed by Brayfield-Rothe ³⁵. Reliability of the scales has been assessed by using test-retest reliability approach and validity has been assessed by examining content validity. Seventeen statements were used to determine the job satisfaction level of primary school teachers. The statements were made in considering various psychological domain. The secondary data have been collected through desk study which covered research articles, research monographs, textbooks and various published and unpublished materials on the subject.

The respondents were asked to the following questions for determining the job satisfaction level.

4. Findings and Discussion

The following data obtained from public primary school teachers in the study area

The following data obtained from private primary school teachers of the study area.

From the below table, the t-value of the job satisfaction of the public and private primary school teachers was 1.45 which was lower than the tabulated value. So, the null hypothesis was accepted. That means there was no relation between the job satisfaction of primary school teachers regarding public and private. Nasima and Alam determined with the facts that not only community but also personal ability are overall pleased with their present condition ³⁶. As the ability of community colleges are government service owners, so they get provident finance and residence with medical features ³⁷. However, personal colleges get a good wage inconsistent basis. It has been discovered that there is no factor between community and women teachers regarding job satisfaction ³⁸. Ahamed et al. ³⁹ said the instructors who are women, the instructors who are married, the instructors who have educational result up to average, the instructors whose educational self-discipline is humanities, and also the instructors whose experience is more than Several decades are pleased with their job in the domain of community main educational institutions in Bangladesh ⁴⁰. In addition, it has been discovered that the purchasing power of community main school teachers’ is decreasing gradually and now socio-economically they are in a deplorable situation compared to the previous decades. Rubel and Kee indicated that manager actions, settlement, and advantages and work life balance all have a positive important impact on job satisfaction where settlement and advantages have the biggest impact ⁴¹. On the opposite, job personality is discovered having an unimportant effect on job satisfaction. Last, job satisfaction was discovered favorably and significantly related with worker in-role performance.

5. Conclusion and Recommendations

This empirical study has taken in its purview the demographic variables, academic status, the length of service and other related issues of the public primary school teachers in Bangladesh based on Bogra District to measure comparative job satisfaction. It revealed that majority of the teachers regardless of private and public school were satisfied with their jobs. The teachers of the public school were more satisfied than private school teachers. It also found that female teachers were more satisfied than their counter one. Though job satisfaction largely depends on teacher’s sex, marital status, experience, academic discipline, academic qualification, and result but the working environment, salary, promotion, related policy are also responsible factors for job satisfaction of the school teachers in Bangladesh. To increase job satisfaction of the primary school teachers irrespective of private and public, the present study offers some suggestions. First of all, the government should improve the compensation package. The government may offer them with special compensation package based on their educational certification, academic discipline, and educational result. Secondly, for the female teacher's transfer system should be flexible so that the distance of school from home would be reduced. Additionally, management harassments and illegal governmental disturbance should be managed by the government. The responsibility for the teacher should be presented which will be helpful for teachers as well as students. The teachers and students rate should be logical in the school regardless of public and private.

References