When The Negative Effect Of Effort On Job Satisfaction Is Stronger?

The relationship of effort, job performance and job satisfaction is always onecentral topic in organizational behavior and marketing research. So many studies andmodels, but little important common conclusion could be found. There are7basicmodels for job performance-job satisfaction relationship, and also different resultswhen detecting these three variables’ relationship.Faced with such a old and confusing research topic, there are two ways to breakthe wall: to be based on a new theory or to find the research gap in literature. And thisresearch began from a paper’s research gap.When reviewing their relationships, we found a management problem inprevious model which is counter-intuitive, that is―more effort leads to less jobsatisfaction‖. We took this management problem as our research problem, and forunderstanding this problem, we proposed work values as moderator in effort-jobsatisfaction negative relationship,Firstly, we summarized conceptions, dimensions, relative studies on effort, jobperformance, job satisfaction and work values, and also main models about them.Then we constructed a theoretical model to answer research questions that areproposed in introduction. The empirical analysis is based on189samples, and theconclusions are below:(1) Effort is positively related to job satisfaction. The negative effect is notsupported, and its theory base may be problematic.(2) Effort is positively related to job performance.(3) Job performance is correlated with job satisfaction significantly, but no causalrelationship.(4) Work values are classified as terminal value and instrumental value, aftercontrolling relative variables in regression analysis, we found their moderation effecton effort-job satisfaction relationship is not significant.At last, the paper pointed out that when analyzing effort-job satisfactionrelationship, we should pay more attention to difference between physical and mentaleffort, thus maybe the moderator effect of work values can be found. As for themeasurement of some sensitive variables, which is like work values, job performance,it is better to take quasi-experiment to control context and to get more objective data.