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Abstract. Social workers' job satisfaction is one of the elements which can ensure the success of social services in the long-term. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study involving 25 social workers who work for public institutions and NGOs in Bihor county. The results show that helping people, solving the cases, the clients' satisfaction, good relations with colleagues and superiors, recognition/appreciation of the work done, promotion and personal development, salary, lack of stress at the workplace, supervision are only some of the determinants of job satisfaction. The recommendations for increasing social workers' job satisfaction focus on adequate remuneration for work, offering employees the possibility to take part in continuing education programmes, improving inter-institutional cooperation etc.
Keywords: job characteristics, job satisfaction, social workers, sources of satisfaction, stress
Introduction
The importance of employees' job satisfaction is recognised and its relation with performance, absenteeism, turnover has been studied by many researchers from the field of social work (Jayaratne, Chess, 1984; Farmer, 2011; Calitz, Roux,Strydom, 2014). The social work profession is a complex one and it implies a great responsibility. Intervention in social work assumes that the social worker has certain skills, as well as of specialist knowledge (Neam{u, 2011). Working with clients often involves great emotional engagement and the success of the intervention depends in most cases on the cooperation of experts, on good teamwork (Allen et. al., 2004).
Job satisfaction should be taken into account, as working in social services is frequently associated "with large caseloads, stress and resources too limited to perform the jobs satisfactorily" (Jessen, 2010, 2).
We initiated this study having in mind some of our own previous studies on stress and burnout among social workers (Marc, 0§vat, 2013), as well as on supervision (0§vat, Marc, Makai-Dimeny, 2014), in which a high number of respondents spoke about heavy workload, the pressure of deadlines, the limitations placed on interventions and the need for supervision.
Job satisfaction has been defined by Edwin Locke as : "a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's job or job experiences" (Locke 1976, 1304 apud Saari, Judge, 2004, 396). The factors of job satisfaction are both situational and dispositional, and in the studies conducted on this issue the focus is placed either on...