著者

渡辺 直登 WATANABE Naotaka

出版者

名古屋大学教育学部

雑誌

名古屋大學教育學部紀要 (ISSN:03874796)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.29, pp.263-277, 1982-12-28 (Released:2006-01-06)

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The purpose of the present syudy is to investigate the relationships between job satisfaction and mental health status of people who work in organizations. To attain this goal, Alderfer's ERG theory was employed as the framework of measuring job satisfaction. 336 male employees belonging to three different kinds of organizations served as respondents: 169 respondents of an electric power company, 101 respondents of a bank, and 66 respondents of a manufacturing company. Two kinds of questionnaires and an inventory were administered to these groups. They were the Need Satisfaction Questionnaire (NSQ), Need Importance Questionnaire (NIQ), and Cornell Medical Index (CMI). NSQ and NIQ are questionnaires developed by the author which include 27 items reflecting the concepts of Existence need, Relatedness need, and Growth need based on ERG theory. Each ERG need category has 9 items. The degrees of need satisfaction and need importance of each respondent in terms of each need category were indicated by the total scores on 5-point scales. The reliabilities of the both questionnaires were sufficiently high (coefficient alpha of each test ranged from .708 t0 .879). CMI was utilized to measure the degree of mental health of each respondent. In order to evaluate the responses to CMI, the discriminative chart of neurosis developed by Fukamachi et al. was used. The chart is said to be able to resolve the respondents' neurotic tendencies into four levels: normal (region I), provisionally normal (region II), provisionally neurotic (region III), and neurotic (region IV). Major findings were as follows: (1) It was found that the ERG need category is valid as a whole. (2) There existed a strong relationship between the employees' mental health status and his degree of job satisfaction. (3) The mental health status partly moderates the relationships between need satisfaction and need importance (need desire) as proposed by ERG theory. Regarding the first finding, factor analyses elicited three factors reflecting E, R, and G needs in the NSQ and NIQ. Although there appeared to be some overlapping items and relatively high correlations among the three factors, the factor analyses demonstrated relatively clear tri-factorial structures. This may indicate that the ERG need category is appropriate for exploring the need structure of Japanese employees. Regarding the second finding, the result of the multiple comparisons of the degree of job satisfaction in terms of CMI regions showed significant differences in every case. This result provides evidence that there is a clearly resolvable difference in the degree of job satisfaction between employees who maintain mental health and those who do not. Examining this result, it can be said in general that those who have less job satisfaction are apt to suffer from the more serious neurotic disorder. Regarding the third finding, the collective data of the respondents who were diagnosed to be normal by CMI showed the expected significant positive correlation in terms of the relationships of E need satisfaction - R need importance, R need satisfaction - G need importance, and G need satisfaction - G need importance. On the other hand, the collective data of the respondents who were diagnosed to be provisionally neurotic or neurotic showed negative rather than positive correlations in each of the three satisfaction - importance relationships. This result might mean that the need satisfaction - need desire hypothesis of ERG theory originated from the Maslow's need hierarchy theory is relevant for those who have no neurotic tendencies but is less relevant for those having such tendencies.