Factors influencing job satisfaction of technical personnel in the U.S., Singapore, and India

Abstract

The projected job growth rate for technical personnel such as computer programmers, drafters, engineering technicians, and science technicians is expected to grow at an average of 25% per year. Improving the job satisfaction of employees becomes critical as these technical personnel begin to be considered the elite workers who provide the competitive edge. This research investigates the factors that affect job satisfaction of technical employees in three countries. The results show that only two factors, job characteristics and organizational progressiveness, influenced job satisfaction in all the three countries. Thus multi-national corporations need to enrich the employees' jobs and position their organizations progressively if they want their employees to be satisfied. Also U.S. technical personnel perceived that they needed to become managers to attain better job status and pay; this perception was not supported by counterparts in Singapore and India. This result indicates that it is important for U.S. top-level executives and human resource managers to develop practices to increase the perceived status of technical personnel.