The article is titled ‘The Effect of Gender on Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment in Kuwait’ by Rastied Al-Ajmi. It explores the effect of gender on employee’s perception of job satisfaction and commitments to organizations and relates specifically to Kuwait. In the study underlying the article, the researchers sampled 436 employees, 223 males and 213 were females from five ministries in Kuwait. The study employed correlation, t-tests as well as one way analysis to come up with a conclusion.
The study explores existing literature and notes that there is a convergence towards the fact that gender roles are an important issue for women in employment. Notably, the issues that have drawn the attention of researchers are work values and job attitudes. These studies also note that the most commonly used measures of attitudes are mainly job satisfaction and commitment to an organization. Lastly, the studies show that the relationships between personal characteristics and work attitude might be very different for different workers in different part of the world. This, therefore, necessitates the current study, which focuses on Kuwaiti workers and evaluates some previously held hypothesis .The study seeks to answer the question as to whether Kuwaiti females are as satisfied with their jobs as their male counterparts, and also attempts to identify the areas of consideration.
It’s noted that results from many previous researchers concerning the relationship between gender and organizational commitment have been very contradictory, and/or inconsistent, with some concluding that women were more satisfied with their jobs while others found that men were more satisfied with their jobs as compared to the women. However, these studies do not reveal any significant differences in the levels of satisfaction .In fact, many of these researchers found that there was compelling similarities in relation to the levels of satisfaction between male and female workers. Gender was also identified not t have any effects on job satisfaction in most of the studies. While women felt more discriminated in their places of work, most of the studies concluded that despite this, they were equally as satisfied as their male counterparts.
Gender and Organizational Commitment
This study explores a number of previous works regarding the subject of gender and organizational commitment and notes that most of these studies have concluded that this relationship is very vague. In fact, most of the studies cited in this article reveal that there have been mixed results found for this relationship in all prior works, with some studies suggesting that gender may affect employees perception of organizational commitment.
Most of the studies identified in this section reveal that no significant differences in these sexes existed in regard to the commitment to the organizations goals and objectives. In a study carried out in 1993 by Aven, Parker, and McEvoy, it was found that there was no relationship between gender and organizational commitment. It was also established that women and their male counterparts experienced similar levels of commitment to their organizations. Another study by Savicki, Cooly, & GJesvold (2003) found no significant differences between the commitment levels of men and women to their organizations. In this particular study where the respondents were managers, it was found that their commitment did not relate in any way to their gender. In the last study identified in this article, Xiong & Francesco (2000) concluded that apart from position, all other demographic factors and variables including gender had little effect on organizational commitment.
The present study was therefore committed to evaluating the previous findings of other researches with the intention of deciding whether they still hold even today. In this study, the researchers sampled 436 staff from both genders in five Kuwaiti ministries and administered an open ended questionnaire to them. The job satisfaction instruments that were employed in the study were a scale of five items, some including statements such as “Generally speaking, I am very satisfied with this job" and "I frequently think of quitting this job". A second method used was the seven point response scale that ranges from (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) and these were averaged to determine the level of job satisfaction among the respondents.
In order to assess the level of organizational commitment, the researchers used the 15-item measure that assesses the employee’s level of identification with an organization. Employees were then told to indicate whether they agreed or disagreed with the items identified.
The results of the data analysis indicated that there was no relationship between gender and organizational commitment or even job satisfaction in Kuwait and this confirms the findings of the previous researchers. Therefore, men and women in Kuwait have the same level of satisfaction and organizational commitment.
Recommendations for improving the study
The results of this study would have been more conclusive if the researchers would have taken their sample from both private and public sector. This is because the work environment from private sector is different from that in the public sector.
Secondly, selecting the sampled employees from different levels would have captured a larger spectrum of their views. Lastly, the methodology of testing for commitment and job satisfaction should be expanded to include the issues of personal career goals and particular employer’s characteristics.
