Research On Evaluation Of Job Satisfaction Of University Library Staff In Sri Lanka

Satisfaction of employees about their jobs can be considered as a main factor for success and productivity of any organization and career development of employees attached to that organization.Though many researchers have been defined it with different aspects,it is simply known as employees' perception on their own job and related aspect and their measurement and judgments in between satisfied to dissatisfied.As employees spend quite considerable period of time in their lives at the place of their working it is important to understand the individuals' perception on their job and relating factors and issues.Job satisfaction is widely and frequently researched concept in organizational behavior.A vast array of researches conducted in worldwide on job satisfaction on employees has been proved that much satisfied employees with their work are fully dynamic,steady,trustworthy,helpful,and always dedicated to work.In the review of literature,much attention has been drawn to understand about the scenario on job satisfaction of university library staff.In these studies,it has been given the attention,mainly,on academics in libraries:professional and paraprofessional staff members.Generally,university libraries are considered as the heart of the university.Hence,staff members of a library can be classified as a very important group of people,since they work to fulfill the vision and mission of the university by disseminating universal knowledge to the scholarly community in the university.However,due to various reasons,some employees in university libraries show poor job performances and attitudes towards their jobs.These situations,directly or indirectly,contribute to the poor functionality of the library.In the literature of library and Information Science in Sri Lanka,few studies have been carried out relate to motivation,job satisfaction and job competencies on staff of the university libraries.It is interestingly noticed that there is a gap in literature as all these studies mainly focused on the professional staff serving in university libraries.Therefore,this study carried out to fill the gap in the literature by comprehensively exploring the job satisfaction and related aspects of all three staff categories(Professional,Para-professional and supporting staff)working in university libraries in Sri Lanka.This study conducted to achieved five main research objectives as to exploring the current level of job satisfaction,identifying the factors related to job satisfaction,determining of influencing factors,barriers related to job satisfaction and finally to give recommendations and suggestions to improve the present level of job satisfaction of university library professionals in Sri Lanka.Furthermore,this study provide an excellent opportunity to entire university library employee population to express their own attitudes,feelings and ideas related to each and every aspect of their present job and job satisfaction by using a instrument developed specially for this study.In addition,the suggestions and recommendations of the present study will put an effort to draw the attention of university authorities and administration to enhance the job satisfaction of library employees specially in university libraries in Sri Lanka and other types of library employees as well.This thesis consisted with six chapters and brief introduction on each chapter has given below.Chapter One:IntroductionChapter one is the introductory chapter and it presented a conceptual background and significance of the study with the brief introduction of university library system and staff in Sri Lanka.Then it explained the problem of the study followed by research questions and objectives and research methodological aspects of the research.This chapter concluded with the innovation of the present study,and,finally illustrated chapter organization related to the dissertation.Chapter Two:Literature ReviewChapter two reviews the existing literature related to job satisfaction with concept definition,variables related to job satisfaction in general,influencing factors of job satisfaction with particularly to the university library professionals and measurement of job satisfaction.Then the study in details described about the previous studies related to job satisfaction of library employees in both international and local research arena.Chapter Three:Overview of Job satisfaction models and theoriesThe third chapter of this thesis provided the detailed information on theoretical background of the study.It first provided the comprehensive overview of major content and process theories related to job satisfaction followed by an evaluation of all the job satisfaction theories and models described previously.The job satisfaction model and the tool creates by the present study be presented at the end of the chapter.Sometimes it is difficult to use the variables or scales or theories developed by the western countries regarding the steps taken to evaluate and measure of satisfaction levels of library employees,due to socio-economic and cultural differences.At the same time research finding may different from the original scales.Therefore,the tool and the proposed model introduced by the present study is specially developed for the developing country like Sri Lanka.The economic,social,educational and cultural aspects of the country were taken in to special consideration while developing the tool.Though this tool and the research model developed to evaluate the job satisfaction of library staff attached to universities in Sri Lanka,it is also can be adopted to evaluate the employees in other types of libraries in the country and as well as the other countries in the world.Chapter Four:Research DesignThis chapter of the thesis depicted the research design and methodology,study population,methods of data collection,development and structure of the questionnaire,reliability and validity of the survey instrument and pilot survey and interviews used for this study.Description of data analysis plan and method for analyzing collected research data were presented at the end.This study was designed in four phases and adopted exploratory mixed method design as the research design and used both qualitative and quantitative data.The quantitative data mainly obtained from a survey questionnaire.Semi structured interview methods was also used to obtain data specially from the university librarians.Entire university library staff population,which is 707 employees attached to fifteen university libraries had selected for the study.However,due to internal delay regarding to obtain permission for ethical clearance during the survey period the University Colombo had to drop from the study population.Finally,the study sample consisted of 643 university library employees including 107 professional,321 Para-Professional and 215 Supporting Staff are attached to libraries of 14 government universities in Sri Lanka.Survey data mainly obtained through a questionnaire and interviews.Pilot study was carried out with 25 library employees representing all three staff categories and some minor modification have done to the questionnaire and based on the results of the pilot survey.Google online form method mainly used to send out questionnaire for the professional staff and for the other staff members,questionnaires were distributed through the personal visits around all 14 libraries by the researcher.Data collection period was nearly four months from July-October 2017.Out of 643 distributed questionnaires 525 returned and the questionnaire response rate is 81.65%.However,15 questionnaires had to exclude as they were incomplete and 510 questionnaires were taken to the final data analysis of the study.The usable questionnaire response rate of this study is 79.32%and it was a relatively high rate to study the job satisfaction of entire library employee population in university context in Sri Lanka.Semi structured interview method also used to obtain data from the university librarians.Collected data was analyzed by using Statistical Package for Social Science(SPSS)version 22 for windows by mainly using factor analysis,multiple regression and other frequency and descriptive statistically analyzing techniques.Chapter Five:Survey on job satisfaction of staff in university libraries in Sri LankaFirst part of the survey analyzed the response rate and the demographic information about the respondents such as place of working,gender,civil status,designations,age,working experiences by years and highest educational qualifications by using frequencies and descriptive statistical methods of SPSS.The second and the third part of the survey questionnaire was analyzed to explore the level of job satisfaction,factors related to job satisfaction,identification of most influencing factors and barriers of job satisfaction of university library employees in Sri Lanka.Finally,it discussed about the suggestions to improve the job satisfaction based on the survey responses provided by the respondents of the survey.According to the survey findings,the overall mean value of 3.74 indicates that the staff members were fairly satisfied with the present jobs in university libraries.There were seven factors identified through the factor analysis related to the context of job satisfaction in Sri Lanka as salary and benefits,co-workers,physical working conditions,career opportunities and development,nature of work,appreciation and feedbacks and cooperation.Out of these seven factors co-workers and nature of work identified as the most influential factors related to context of job satisfaction of university library professionals in Sri Lanka.Physical working conditions,career opportunities and development and salary and benefits had been identified as the moderate influencing factors related to job satisfaction.However,according to survey findings the factors of cooperation and appreciation and feedback had no impact on job satisfaction and therefore these two factors named as least influencing factors related to job satisfaction of employees,serving in university libraries in Sri Lanka.Based on the survey findings of the present study there were ten factors identified as the barriers or the dissatisfying factors related to job satisfaction.Those factors as follows;communication gaps and errors,lack of job autonomy,Poor management,poor working environment,poor corporation among colleagues,University policies and procedures,lack of human resources,financial difficulties,less opportunities for career development and lack of resources.Chapter Six:Conclusion,recommendations and limitationsFinally,the chapter seven summarizes the findings,overall conclusions and recommendations to improve the job satisfaction of library employees surveying in university library context of the country.Also,the research limitations and suggestions for future research areas will be discussed at the end of the chapter.Based on the survey findings and evidence from previous research studies,it can be concludes that the staff in university libraries in Sri Lanka are fairly satisfied with their jobs.However,the present study concluded that with some additional changes and implications,the present job satisfaction level can be upgraded to much satisfaction levels than the present.Also with regard to seven factors identified from the survey,factors of'cooperation' and 'appreciation and feedback' have no significant impact towards employee jobs satisfaction.Hence,the present study concludes that these two factors need to be improved as early as possible in order to increase the current job satisfaction level of employees.This study further conclude that the library administration and university authorities and policy makers must work together to find solutions to eradicate the dissatisfaction factors related to current level of job satisfaction and enhance the employee job satisfaction levels.The recommendation and implication made by this study provide a guideline to take measures to improve the job satisfaction levels of university library staff members in Sri Lanka.This survey limited to fifteen government universities only.Due to delay of getting permissions for the ethical clearance in university of Colombo,it had to exclude from the study population.However,in future there is research potential to conduct the survey in university of Colombo as well.Then the entire university library staff population can be covered.In future,the same research methodology can be used to evaluate the job satisfaction of library staff working in private universities in Sri Lanka.Then the research result can be compare with the level of job satisfaction of library staff working in government university libraries and private university libraries.The present study used only seven variables to evaluate the job satisfaction scenario of university library staff as salary and benefits,co-workers,physical working conditions,career opportunities and development,nature of work,appreciation and feedbacks and cooperation.In future,the job satisfaction of university library staff can be measured by using different variables such as social status,job autonomy,promotion,supervision,communication,performance evaluation etc.