People management in welfare sector. An empirical investigation on job satisfaction among people-care workers in Italy

In people care, such as in many other service sectors, the output is difficult to measure and the quality of service is greatly dependent on highly skilled workers and on their level of engagement. Particularly for Welfare sector, according to prior evidence, the individual performance (i.e. work engagement) is linked to intrinsic aspects of motivation and relational aspects of the work but also extrinsic aspects of work satisfaction may be of relevance. The paper focus on job satisfaction, in terms of extrinsic and intrinsic satisfaction. Specifically, extrinsic rewards derive from factors associated with the job context; these include for example pay, working conditions and professional development. Intrinsic rewards refer to „psychological enjoyment‟; its items derive from factors inherent in the way in which the work is designed, that is the job content; for example, job variety and creativity and relational aspects of own job. Job satisfaction represent a steam of research which is particularly important both in social cooperatives and for people care workers such as elderly care workers or teachers but a relative amount of prior research has been studying this aspect for this specific sector. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the extrinsic and intrinsic aspects of job satisfaction for people-care workers. The paper starts from a literature review considering streams of research on job satisfaction in general and in welfare sector. In the empirical part, results of a statistical analysis are presented based on a sample of employees operating in people care sector in Italy. The analysis investigates the different perception of extrinsic and intrinsic aspects of job satisfaction that people care workers have considering different clusters of individual depending on: generation, level of education and job position. The paper ends with final remarks about managerial implications.