The hierarchizations consistency of the potential sources of work satisfaction: methods of achieving and assessing hierarchic orders

• Published in: Sociologie românească Vol. 9; no. 2; pp. 66 - 85
• Main Authors: Păun, Gheorghe, Mamali, Cătălin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Romanian; English
• Published: Iasi Eikon Publishing House 01.01.2011; Editura Eikon; Editura Expert Projects (Expert Projects Publishing House); Expert Projects
• Subjects: Comparative analysis; Condorcet paradox; Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat; consistency; Democracy; Discontent; Hierarchies; Job Satisfaction; Motivation; pairwise comparison; Satisfaction; scalar hierachizations; Social life; Social life & customs; Social Participation; Social Sciences; Social Stratification; sources of work satisfaction; Workers; pairwise comparison; Condorcet paradox; sources of work satisfaction; consistency; scalar hierachizations
• ISSN: 1220-5389; 2668-1455

In social life, people try to know, to build, to maintain, to change, to destroy and to avoid hierarchies. At the social level, the hierarchical systems are considered to be desirable for their capacity to increase efficiency, communication and control in the human actions, and undesirable for generating stratification of social actors, impeding participation and democracy. In this paper we focused on the consistency of the hierarchies, answering to the question of what happens when one and the same person hierarchizes the same set of objects using two different ways. We applied this in a particularly research field - the work motivation – being interested to study the consistency of the hierarchies of satisfaction sources. We used a list of 24 factors of work satisfaction and motivation that we applied to a group 56 young workers in an enterprise, asking them to fill an indirect hierarchization questionnaire in which all the factors were compared among themselves (resulting 276 diads), and a direct hierarchization, by asking the subjects to select, in order, the most important five factors for generating work satisfaction and the most important 5 factors for generating work dissatisfaction. We found that the highly trained subjects are more “coherent” than the low educated. Scalar hierarchization seems to be more natural, because more subjects are consistent in this case, compared with pairs examination. Finally, the respondents violated independence condition with the same ease as they produce Condorcet paradoxes, making us think at the cost of avoiding such paradoxical results when dealing with complex data.