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At the break of dawn each day, we happen to see an ocean of people treading their professional paths and during the day we are likely to come across a bunch of them hailing from professional spheres that are different from our own. When we hear of their job roles and designations, our brain effortlessly tags them with certain traits and characteristics such as a businessman to be shrewd, a teacher to be altruistic, a nurse to be compassionate and a police officer to be dominating and so on. Since this process happens almost unconsciously, we seldom ask ourselves or ponder over the question, whether it’s the job role that has made them shrewd, altruistic etc. or do people with these characteristics opt for these job roles.
If it is the job roles that chisels the characteristics of the professionals, then we wouldn’t probably be able to justify the existence of compassionate capitalists, honest politicians and attorneys who have broken the law and such. So, in majority of the scenarios the suitable profession for a person would be the one that he/she chooses on the basis of their innate traits and interests and it is this that makes them the best fit for the job.
Career development theorists such as Donald Super and Holland state along the same lines, that choice of professional spheres on the basis of one’s traits and personalities also play an imperative role in deciding the level of job satisfaction an employee derives from his job. As Super states, when a career choice is the means we find to materialize our interests, the greater the congruence between the passion and profession, greater will be the job satisfaction and in turn, greater will be the professional growth and advancement.
Of what use is an employee’s job satisfaction to the organization?
For an employee, his/her job satisfaction is one of the major contributors for life satisfaction and psychological well-being. From an organizational perspective, higher the job satisfaction of the employees, the more profitable it is for the organization, for two simple reasons:
- It increases the productivity of the employees.
- It enhances the employee engagement levels, assures greater loyalty and creates a more steady and reliable workforce.
The understanding of this concept comes from the humanistic approach that rightly said that, an organization cannot separate an individual from his personal self even during his work hours. For instance, the person who is creative by nature couldn’t be made to take up time bound work with impending deadlines. In the same way, a highly qualified individual’s productivity cannot be enhanced unless he/she takes interest in his/her job and is passionate about it. Nor can we expect an individual with lesser qualification to be low on productivity if he/she is passionate about his/her work. Thus greater the congruence between the passion and profession that accommodates one’s interests and facilitates personal growth and development, greater will be the job satisfaction and in turn higher the organizational development.
What are organizations of the present generation doing about it?
With the turn of the century, there has been a greater understanding and acceptance of the above concept in the backdrop of field researches and feedback surveys. On one hand, the industries of the present day have modified their approach to recruitment and have incorporated psychometric assessments as a key element to the process. And, on the other, happiness quotient has gained its ground in the world of work as well, making it one of the decisive components in ensuring job satisfaction. Simultaneously, platforms like Draup are coming up with means to map the relevant personality traits to particular job roles very meticulously.
Hence for an organization to find the right person for the right job, not only involves finding a candidate with excellent qualification and experience, but also finding the right personality. This in turn would create a workforce that internalizes the organizational aspirations and strives for its overall advancement and sourcing out this information from the right sources would only further ensure it.
