Modeling The Effects Of Social Integration And Job Autonomy On Job Satisfaction Among School Sport Facilitators In Southern Gauteng

Abstract

Research within the domain of job satisfaction has brought about renewed interest among human resource practitioners and researchers in the past twenty years. Furthermore, many studies have examined the antecedents of job satisfaction in various organisational settings. However, focusing on social integration and job autonomy relationships with work outcomes have been limited and worthy of empirical investigation. The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between social integration and job autonomy on job satisfaction among school sport facilitators. The study is located with a quantitative research paradigm. A structured questionnaire consisting of validated scales for social integration, job autonomy and job satisfaction was administered to a sample of 201 school sport facilitators in the Southern Gauteng region of South Africa. The results show significant positive correlations among the constructs, social integration, and job autonomy and job satisfaction. In addition, social integration, a facet of QWL life and job autonomy was found to significantly influence job satisfaction. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to examine the fit to the proposed model and the path model using structural equation modelling (SEM) to examine casual relationships among the constructs.  Results show satisfactory goodness-of fit indices. The path model showed strong casual relationships indicating that social integration and job autonomy of school sport facilitators significantly related to job satisfaction. The results demonstrate that the higher the prevalence of social integration and job autonomy, the higher the levels of job satisfaction. It is recommended that sport facilitators should be given adequate autonomy to make decisions about the services they render and any top-down imposition of change may be counter-productive to job satisfaction among sport facilitators.