A structural equation model of job satisfaction in the Italian social cooperatives

Friday, May 11, 2012 at 10 A.M. at Euricse

A seminar with Enrico Ciavolino, Università del Salento, Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze Sociali and Maurizio Carpita, Università di Brescia, Dipartimento Metodi Quantitativi

Job satisfaction is generally viewed as the degree to which workers like their job, and its importance in economic, social and psychological sciences has been clearly recognized a long time ago because high levels of it have been related to extra work effort, performance and well-being.

Ceteris paribus, job satisfaction is related to many others conceptual constructs as distributive and procedural fairness, motivations, and the level of autonomy, that together constitute the psychological contract “signed” by employees with their organization. Recent studies highlight that for employees in social cooperatives there is a complex mix between all these latent factors, and this mix defines the quality of work.

Using data from a recent Survey on the Italian Social Cooperatives carried out on about 4,000 workers over more than 300 social cooperatives known as ICSI2007, the objective of our study is twofold: (i) to construct some multidimensional statistical measures of the subjective quality of work and (ii) to integrate these measures into a structural equation model that describes the links between the various work quality latent factors measured from the observed data.

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