ABSTRACT

A Study on the Relationships among Job Stressors, Job Satisfaction, and Organizational Commitment of Social Welfare Officials
- focusing on the comparison with police and fire officials-

Bae, Jeom-Mo
Department of Social Welfare
The Graduate School
Chonbuk National University

Ⅰ. Introduction

Recently the social environment under which public officials work has changed rapidly. The workload of Social welfare officials has been greatly enlarged by increasing welfare demands. Police and fire officials have to work under risky and dangerous conditions. Inevitably they suffer trauma in performing their jobs. Furthermore, they perform their work under strenuous conditions such as role overload, role ambiguity, and role conflict. Sometimes, these overburdened public workers have to work under such conditions as lack of job autonomy and participative decision making. All these factors are stressors that lead to high levels of job stress among social welfare officials, police, and fire officials. If these stressors are not managed adequately, the level of job satisfaction decreases which in turn arouses increasingly lower levels of organizational commitment which potentially leads to harmful impediments in the performance of their work. In enhancing organizational performance, high organizational commitment and high job satisfaction, we can greatly increase levels of job satisfaction and organizational commitment and lessen job stressors considerably. Also we should moderate the relationship between job stressors and job satisfaction by social support.
In this context, the Author analyzed the relationship among job stressors, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment of police, fire, and social welfare officials. And the Author analyzed the moderating effect of social support on the relationship between job stressors, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment.

Ⅱ. Research Design

The sampling method selected in this study was stratified sampling (the author sampled the survey target group according to administrative hierarchy such as Seoul Metropolitan City, megalopolis and local province), cluster sampling (the author sampled the target group by organization unit), and random sampling.
After collecting data by questionnaire survey, the author ultimately analyzed the selected research units which were 1,032 cases (each 344 cases of police, fire, and social welfare officials). Two types of statistical packages such as SPSS 14.0 and AMOS 7.0 were also used. Statistical methods used in this study were descriptive statistics, reliability test, validity test, frequency analysis, cross-tabs analysis, ANOVA by SPSS 14.0, and path analysis and multi-group analysis by SEM of AMOS 7.0.

Ⅲ. Results

Through analysis of the pertinent data, it was discovered that a lot of social welfare officials were young, unmarried women who held a bachelor degree. Some of them had low income, with others attaining high incomes. They are generally occupied at a low position in the public servant group. Almost 50% of them are less than 35 years old. Among them more than 54.9% have only a 10 year total career as a public servant. Moreover there were more than 76.2% who only have less than 3 years in their present position.
In the area of roles, the level of role overload and role ambiguity of social welfare officials was comparatively high. Fire officials had the highest level of job satisfaction. By contrast the lowest level of job satisfaction was belonged to social welfare officials. Although social welfare officials had the lowest level of emotional commitment, they had a highest level of continuance commitment. Compared with Social welfare officials, who received the highest level of social support, police officials were found to have the lowest level of social support in every sphere. And in the case of fire officials, job satisfaction only occupied a medium status.
In case of total public officials, every job stressor had a significant effect on job satisfaction and in turn job satisfaction had a significant effect on organizational commitment.
In case of social welfare officials only role overload was a significant stressor which effects on the job satisfaction. In case of police officials, role ambiguity and perceived control had a significant effect, while fire officials indicated role ambiguity and role conflicts as having the most impact on job satisfaction. Additionally in every case, public official''s job satisfaction had a significant effect on organizational commitment. All of the significant stressors had a negative effect on job satisfaction. Among significant stressors role ambiguity had the strongest effect on job satisfaction. Also the strongest positive relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment manifested in case of fire officials.
If we see broadly the moderating effect of the social support level, role overload→job satisfaction path and job satisfaction→organizational commitment path had the more moderating effect than any other paths. In case of police and fire officials, each sub-social support had at least one moderating effect on the one path. While informational support upon social welfare officials did not have any moderating effect. But material support had a significant moderating effect on the relationship between role overload and job satisfaction. Also material support had a weak significant effect on both the role conflict→job satisfaction and non-perceived control→job satisfaction paths.
The moderating effect by the origin of social support was manifested only in the case of police officials. But in the other cases, there was no moderating effect. In case of police officials, emotional support and material support had a moderating effect by origin of support on the role conflicts→job satisfaction path. Also emotional support on police officials had a moderating effect by origin of support on the role ambiguity→job satisfaction path.
If there is an emotional support upon police officials at the role overload→job satisfaction path, intra-organizational support had a more beneficial effect upon job satisfaction than extra-organizational support. Also on the role ambiguity→job satisfaction path, emotional support from extra-organizational support had a significant negative effect.

Key words : social welfare official, police official, fire official, job stressor, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, social support, moderating effect.