Research On Perceived Job Characteristics, Satisfaction And Professional Development Tendency Of Mid-Level Student Affair Supervisors In China University

Academic subject instruction and college student guidance are two major domains of higher education. In order to strengthen and improve education efforts, the overall quality of student guidance has to be ensured. Therefore, personnel in the office of student affairs play an important role on college campus. While higher education in China is stepping into the pop-stage, student affair personnel are subject to new problems and challenges similar to other educators. In addressing "why our universities hardly nurture outstanding talents?" the quality of student guidance must be improved. The improvement, lies on the professionalism level of student affair staffs to a large extent. The primary location of student counseling is in colleges and departments, staffs and mid-level managers in those offices are playing the leading role here. Their professionalization and career specialization level has a direct and huge impact on the outcomes of student counseling. However, research on their professional, career specialization and job satisfaction level remains a blind spot in the field.Therefore, this research focuses on career characteristics, job satisfaction and career develop tendency of mid-level student affair staffs in higher education. Started with tracking down their career path and investigating reasons of their personal occupation choice, and followed by surveying their job satisfaction and discovering their career development tendency, the thesis is intended to provide theoretical support and guidance for staff professionalism, specialization enhancing and personal retaining in university administration through data collecting and analyzing.Through factor analysis, I first created a measuring system with 15 operation variables in 5 dimension for mid-level manager performance; a survey system with 69 action variables of 13 dimensions for mid-lever manager job satisfactory and 20 operation variables of 5 dimensions for mid-lever manager professional development tendencies. Collected data of all structural elements in the three systems are reliable and valid, based on consistency analysis as well as KMO testing method and Bartlett Sphericity examination method.Research data was collected respectively from 60 colleges; including 985 universities,211 project universities, local comprehensive schools, junior colleges and universities of nationalities. 541 data were analyzed with SPSS 18.0 software factor analysis, regression analysis and multivariate analysis methods. Focusing on the primary goal with consideration of impacts and influences by background variables, the research outcomes provide a fresh train of thoughts to strengthen the human power of the object through new analysis methods, and to enhance their work efficiency as a whole group in China’s higher education.Empirical study was conducted thereafter using structural equation modeling with AMOS 17 software. The result shows that there are significant correlations in between job performance, satisfaction and professional development tendency. First of all, job characteristics and satisfaction have notable influences in career development tendency and are forward-directed. In other words, better understanding of job characteristics and higher job satisfaction leads to more solid tendencies in career paths, and vice versa. Job characteristics satisfaction is interrelated, and demonstrates forward-direction as well. It is that better sensing of job characteristics that leads to a higher degree of job satisfaction, and vice versa. Moreover, the research result also identified that job characteristics not only influences career choices and development tendency directly, but also has notable impact when job satisfaction functions as an intermediate variable.The research provides a series of valuable conclusions, in which the core logic is:overall quality improvement of higher education depends on the job performance improvements of student guidance and counseling, which brings about a critical domain of administration in higher education, is to enhance the professionalism development of student affair personnel.