JOB SATISFACTION OF UNIVERSITY FACULTY IN THE UNITED STATES

The purpose in this study was to measure the perceptions of the job satisfaction of university faculty members in their present positions. Differences in faculty job satisfaction relative to rank, age, tenure, department affiliation, academic discipline using the Biglan Model, and sex were measured. Items contributing the most and least to faculty job satisfaction were identified. A random sample of 600 faculty from twenty-two universities were surveyed using the Job Descriptive Index (JDI) and the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire Short Form (MSQ) to measure job satisfaction. Three hundred thirty-six usable questionnaires were analyzed to test eleven null hypotheses related to rank, age, department affiliation, sex, tenure status, and Biglan Model academic task areas. Statistics employed included T-tests, oneway, and threeway, fixed factor analysis of variance. Separate analyses were used for data measured by the JDI and MSQ. Three of the eleven null hypotheses could be rejected at the .05 level. Statistically significant differences in job satisfaction were found between faculty: in the departments of Agriculture and Mechanical Engineering using MSQ data; by sex using MSQ data; and hard/soft interaction with nonlife/life Biglan Model academic areas using either JDI or MSQ data. Faculty identified twenty-two items as contributing the most to their job satisfaction. The most frequently mentioned items included autonomy, academic freedom, independence, and teaching and/or advising excellent students. Faculty identified fifty-five items as contributing the most to their job dissatisfaction. The most frequent items in this category were pay, poor administration and leadership, lack of support (equipment, budget, secretarial, public), university structure and reward system, and narrow, dogmatic, pompous colleagues. Some conclusions from this study were: differences in faculty job satisfaction do exist with pay identified as a primary dissatisfaction; no statistical significance was found comparing rank, age, tenure, Biglan Model areas except for hard/soft by nonlife/life interaction; females expressed less job satisfaction than males; and professors in Agriculture expressed the highest mean job satisfaction of all respondents