The Relationship Between Job Satisfaction and Employee Loyalty: Case of Teaching-Researcher Staff

Abstract

Employee loyalty is an important determinant of business productivity and management effectiveness, and its decline can cause organisational deviance, reputational losses, counterproductive behaviour of staff, reduced manageability, and, ultimately, increased staff turnover and loss of key employees. The article proposes and empirically confirms two hypotheses: 1) a significant relationship between job satisfaction and employee loyalty; 2) job satisfaction directly affects the employee’s intention to leave the organisation. These hypotheses were tested on the example of academic staff of different universities in Algeria. For this purpose, a random sample was formed, the reliable representativeness of which corresponds to the general population in terms of age, gender and length of service of respondents (500 questionnaires were randomly distributed, 329 of which were approved for analysis, i.e. the share of respondents who agreed to participate in the survey is 65.8%). The Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (a short version of 20 job facets with a five-modality measurement scale) was chosen as the basis for the study of job satisfaction, which was improved by removing and adding individual items and adjusting the wording of individual questions. The validity and reliability of the scales measuring job satisfaction and employee intentions to leave the organisation are high (Cronbach’s alpha is 0.91 and 0.81, respectively). The data was analysed using the statistical software SPSS. V.27, and several statistical methods and tests (Cronbach’s alpha, ANOVA, regression analysis, etc.) were used to test the hypotheses. The study has shown that job satisfaction is significantly related to an employee’s intention to voluntarily leave the organisation: (β = -0.547, p < 0.000), (F = 19,357, p < 0.000). Job satisfaction explains 29.9% of the variance in intentions to leave voluntarily. Job satisfaction has a direct impact on reducing voluntary turnover. This relationship is negative and significant. A moderate direct relationship between employee loyalty and job satisfaction has been confirmed (correlation coefficient R=0.547 is positive), i.e. the higher the job satisfaction, the more loyal employees are to the institution where they work.