Values And Job Satisfaction Towards "Post-Materialism"

Two institutional changes in China-Reform and Opening-have brought about enormous changes in many fields. At the meantime, people’s values have begun to evolve as well. With the development of modernization, a theory about "Post-Materialism" values was put forward by Ronald Inglehart. This theory argues that with economic prosperity and the improvement of education, people place more emphasis on "post-materialism" values, such as the achievement of self-worth and a sense of belonging. Such a value orientation has an effect on the political field as well as the economic field. This study examines the relationship between socioeconomic development and and job satisfaction. It draws on the "post-materialism" values theory and uses multilevel mixed-effect ordered logistic regression to investigate the multilevel effects on job satisfaction. The analytical angle and the modeling techniques are different from those in previous studies, and there are also theoretical innovations. The results reveal that income and work hours are among the most significant determinants of job satisfaction. Specifically, higher income makes job satisfaction higher, and longer work hours lead to lower job satisfaction. The results are somewhat different when we take province level variations into consideration. The effect of income on job satisfaction is reduced in regions of higher economic development. This finding lends support to Inglehart’s theory.