Relationships among vocational rehabilitation counselor job satisfaction, work productivity, and consumer satisfaction

The two primary purposes of this investigation were to create a psychometrically-sound consumer satisfaction instrument specifically for state vocational rehabilitation (VR) agencies and to investigate the relationship between VR counselors' job satisfaction and their work performance, measured in terms of work productivity and consumer satisfaction. Rehabilitation counselor job satisfaction was measured with the Job in General Scale (JIG) and the Job Descriptive Index (JDI), which includes separate scales assessing five facets of job satisfaction. Two additional facet satisfaction scales were created specifically for this study (i.e., Consumers and Agency). Counselor work productivity was measured with three variables: successful competitive closure rate, total number of consumers competitively rehabilitated, and the number of employment plans (IPEs) written.; The instrument created and validated in this study consisted of three scales: Counselor, Services, and Agency. The procedure used in developing the instrument included (1) creation of items based on information obtained from interviewing former VR consumers and an evaluation of the instruments 47 state agencies currently use to measure consumer satisfaction; (2) an expert panel evaluation of the items; (3) a pilot test of the first version of the instrument; and (4) revisions made to the initial version of the instrument based on results of the pilot test. The scales exhibited adequate reliability levels (alpha = .96, .91, and .88 respectively). Evidence for content validity was provided by the expert panel evaluation of items and a common factor analysis provided evidence for construct validity of the instrument.; The sample of counselors was taken from the population of counselors employed by one state agency, and the sample of consumers was taken from the population of their consumers recently closed in status 26 or 28. Three facet scales of the JDI were included in all analyses (Consumer, Work, and Supervision), with an additional scale (Agency) included in one model. The results indicated lack of a relationship between rehabilitation counselor job satisfaction and work productivity. Counselor job satisfaction was not significantly related to overall consumer satisfaction with VR, but was significantly related to consumer satisfaction with the counselor, accounting for between 15–20% of the variance.