Beschreibung

"Companies care about the job satisfaction of their employees, because this is in their very own interest. In fact, dissatisfied workers perform poorly, are often absent and impose hiring costs as they switch employers frequently. Managers, as well as management researchers, agree on the importance of job satisfaction, since the Hawthorne experiments suggested in the 1920s that employees like attentive employers. In contrast, it is still a relatively new trend that politicians and economists also consider satisfaction measures, instead of sticking to GDP growth as the one and only measure of social progress. For instance, the British PM started a nationwide initiative to measure well-being in 2010 in order to reach a 'government policy that is more focused not just on the bottom line, but on all those things that make life worthwhile.' One 'thing' that matters for people's well-being in particular is employment, or, in the bad case, unemployment. In fact, people suffer from losing work more than from hardly any other life event. A consequence is that workers also fear unemployment already when still employed.<br> This raises the question whether policy makers should not allow firms to employ workers on contracts that are limited in time, because such contracts bring about more insecurity about future employment than permanent contracts. Indeed, fixed-term employees often report not to know what will happen when their fixed-term job ends and such uncertainty, in general, lowers job satisfaction. Surprisingly, however, this doesn't automatically mean that fixed-term employees are less satisfied at work than employees with a permanent contract. In fact, numerous studies don't report any negative effect from temporary employment on job satisfaction." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))