Educational Needs and Opportunities As Antecedents of Job Satisfaction

Abstract

It was contended that health professionals in situations where opportunities to satisfy needs for learning are inadequate (or where "opportunities" outstrip "needs") are in a state of incongruence which leads to job dissatisfaction. The contention was tested by administering a measure of need/opportunity incongurence to 103 community mental health workers and correlating the resultant scores with a measure of job satisfaction. "Congruence" (or the need/opportunity discrepancy) scores were derived for seven areas of community mental health work and correlated to scores for five facets of job satisfaction (measured with the Job Descriptive Index). Persons with unmet training needs were significantly more dissatisfied, particularly with "people" and "promotion opportunities", than were "congruent"respondents. A multiple regression equation suggested that, although large amounts of job satisfaction variance remain unexplained, the presence of unmet training needs is associated with job dissatisfaction.

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