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Titus Oshagbemi: The Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast, UK
Introduction
A number of earlier studies suggest that the length of service in a job could be used to estimate the levels of job satisfaction of workers. The assumption is that the less satisfied workers tend to resign while the more satisfied ones tend to remain in a job. Consistent with this thinking, a negative relationship between job satisfaction and turnover has been reported by several researchers (Atchinson and Lefferts, 1975; Karp et al., 1973; Locke, 1976; Mobley et al., 1979). This situation should result in a higher average level of satisfaction being reported by employees whose length of service in an organisation is longer, ceteris paribus. Other researchers have also reported the same negative relationship between job satisfaction and absenteeism (Porters and Steers, 1973; Scott and Taylor, 1985). These findings suggest that organisationsneed to understand the factors affecting employee job satisfaction in orderto manage turnover and absenteeism among other correlates of job dissatisfaction.
In the university work environment, as indeed in several other organisations, length or duration of service in the same organisation does not necessarily guarantee being promoted to a higher rank. Indeed, some employees change their organisations and engage in job-hopping simply to accept promotion to a higher rank, which their initial organisation may deny them. There are several examples of academics who have accepted professorial appointments in other universities when their original universities would deny them such promotion. For such individuals, the duration of their service in the new universities may be short but their rank would be high. As job satisfaction is an important attribute which organisations desire of their employees, this study asks whether length of service in present university or in higher education as a whole is related with the level of job satisfaction?
Literature review
Length of service, as used in this article, refers to the number of years an individual has spent working. Research studies designed to investigate whether or not job satisfaction increases with length of service are few. A search of relevant articles through the Institute of Scientific Information Social Sciences database revealed that only seven articles were published between 1981 and 1998, both years inclusive!The search used "'length of service" as words in title...