Determinants of job satisfaction of public sector engineers: An analysis of a Midwestern state transportation agenc

The existing job satisfaction literature fails to address whether the predictors of job satisfaction for professional public sector employees, such as civil engineers, are unique from everyone else in their respective organization. Public sector professional employees are a core component of what is the human capital within state governments. The purpose of this study was to acquire the knowledge to determine whether certain factors affect engineers and non-engineers in the public sector differently thereby opening the door to future research that examines the motivational drivers of employees in various professions. This exploratory study employs a quantitative approach that examines the impact of intrinsic job characteristics, extrinsic job characteristics, supervisor characteristics and non-supervisor organizational characteristics on the job satisfaction of public sector engineers in a Midwestern transportation agency. Through a series of factor and regression analyses, this study produced a parsimonious job satisfaction model that explained approximately 71 percent and 69 percent of the variance of the job satisfaction for engineers and non-engineers respectively. Such a small difference implies that the model is a strong explanatory tool for both engineers and non- engineers. However, the uniqueness of each group is reflected within the model's three scales (generated by the factor analysis): Extrinsic job characteristics, work environment and job design. The findings suggest that engineers are impacted by extrinsic job characteristics and work environment more so than non-engineers, whereas non- engineers are more impacted by job design. Even with the limitations that accompany this study, it should at least open the door to the consideration that professional public sector employees are motivated and satisfied differently from their non-professional co- workers.