Fun Jobs: Do Millennials Want Them

Many millennial workers are entering employment expecting to have fun. The experience of having fun is a uniquely human desire and fundamental need, to which individuals devote a great deal of time and resources. With the current influx of young workers into the labor force, leaders and managers are beginning to embrace workplace fun proactively as an opportunity to enhance job satisfaction. Although media and the popular press has expounded on the importance of having fun at work, few empirical studies have validated such claims. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to examine the relationships among the three variables of interest in this study: value of workplace fun, the level of experienced workplace fun, and job satisfaction among employed college students. The study was conducted with a convenience sample of 160 students between the ages of 18 -- 22 enrolled at a large public university in the southwestern United States. First, a Pearson's correlation analysis was conducted to assess bivariate relationships. The results revealed a positive relationship between the level of experienced workplace fun and job satisfaction with r = .610, p < .001. Second, a hierarchical moderated regression analysis was utilized in order to determine if the value of fun exerted an influence on the relationship between the level of experienced fun and job satisfaction. The regression analysis results showed that the value of fun did not act as a moderating variable, as the coefficient on the interaction term between the value of fun and the level of fun was not statistically significant with a p-value of .274. The significant findings of this study provided evidence about the importance of workplace fun to millennials and its relevance to job satisfaction, thus justifying further research.