Antecedents of Job Satisfaction among Engineering Faculty

The role of academic professionals is not much researched on the dimensions of professional satisfaction. Measuring job satisfaction needs to assess the extent to which the job holders favorably evaluate their feelings or cognitions about the job. With many institutes spreading the engineering education among the students, it is imperative that the quality and outcomes of these programmes are highly dependent on the faculty members who play key role in imparting this knowledge. In this context, the present study is taken up to understand the job satisfaction among the engineering faculty. An explorative study was conducted among 500 engineering faculty working in the engineering colleges in the Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh, India. An effort is made to elicit opinions of faculty members about various factors such as salary, career development and working environment etc. The Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) was used to capture the facets of job satisfaction among the respondents. The study indicated that factors such as gender, designation, age, experience and the overall job satisfaction were independent of one another. However, factors such as compensation and working conditions were found to be related to the overall job satisfaction.