Culture, industrialisation and multiple domains of employees' job satisfaction: a case for HR strategy redesign in India

Abstract

This paper explores the link between cultural behavioural traits, the potential effect of industrialisation and multiple domains of job satisfaction, utilising survey data collected from public and private service sector employees in Shillong, the capital city of Meghalaya in the North East Region (NER) of India. Results from ordered probit regressions demonstrate a statistically significant impact of both, extrinsic and intrinsic moderating factors on Indian employees' job satisfaction. In view of India's widely reported collectivistic cultural traits, which are assumed to emphasise primarily the importance of extrinsic job aspects, our findings are surprising. They suggest that in the wake of India's significant economic developments the impact of intrinsic job rewards has played ‘catch-up’ with that of their extrinsic counterparts. As such, the study provides evidence in support of embracing human resource management (HRM) practices that incentivise Indian employees not only through their traditional methods aimed at extrinsic job rewards but also by explicitly addressing individual ambitions, needs and aspirations.

Keywords:

• cultural traits
• India
• industrialisation
• job satisfaction

Notes

1. Not unlike job satisfaction, researchers also point out that life satisfaction is influenced by salient values and that these values are learned through socialization in their culture (e.g., Diener and Diener 1995; Keith, Heal and Schalock 1996; Oishi, Diener, Lucas and Suh 1999).

2. Interestingly, within the cultural self-expression domain, Fargher, Kesting, Lange and Pacheco (2008) have recently shown that the influence of cultural values on job satisfaction in Eastern and Western Europe is seen primarily through the impact of interpersonal trust.

3. It should be noted, however, that the cultural explanation of economic phenomena survived in American Institutional Economics. Therefore, with only few exceptions (e.g., Bowles 1998) and until recently, the application of cultural explanations to economic phenomena was almost exclusively discussed by heterodox economic scholars (e.g., Redmond 2006; Cordes 2007).

4. Contrary to the assumption that there are different motivations at play when working for public vs. private sector organisations (e.g., Delfgaauw and Dur 2005), running our regressions separately for public and private sector employees did not display a markedly different pattern of statistically significant moderating factors.

5. Interestingly, such findings also have important implications for a country's economic policy. For example, the case for economic growth becomes less clear-cut and arguments in support of progressive income tax become stronger (e.g., Layard 2005).