Fits, misfits and interactions: learning at work, job satisfaction and job‐related well‐being

• Author: Francis Green,Alan Felstead,Hande Inanc,Duncan Gallie
• Published date: 01 July 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12071
• Date: 01 July 2015

Fits, misfits and interactions: learning at work, job

satisfaction and job-related well-being

Alan Felstead, Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

Duncan Gallie, Nuffield College, Oxford University

Francis Green, University College London Institute of Education

Hande Inanc, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris

Human Resource Management Journal, Vol 25, no 3, 2015, pages 294–310

The resource-based view (RBV) of the firm has focused attention on the importance of aligning

employees’ needs with the requirements of the jobs they do. This article focuses on how these needs and

requirements interact in terms of learning. It does so in two ways. First, it develops new survey

instruments to capture the learning demands of jobs and the learning dispositions of workers and uses

them for the first time in a survey of 2,810 employees. Second, it examines how these person and job

characteristics correlate with specific aspects of job satisfaction and job-related well-being. The results

show that although learning alignment is associated with high levels of satisfaction and well-being, not

all learning misalignments are associated with the reverse.

Contact: Professor Alan Felstead, Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University,

Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT, UK. Email:

alanfelstead@cf.ac.uk

Keywords: learning demands of jobs; learning dispositions of employees; job-related well-

being; job satisfaction

INTRODUCTION

In seeking to understand what makes some businesses more successful than others,

management scholars have turned to two variants of the strengths, weaknesses,

opportunities and threats framework. One focuses on the external opportunities and threats

of market position and conceives of competitive advantage as something gained outside the

firm (Porter, 1985). This ‘outside-in’ approach prompts managers to address practical questions

such as what market should the business be in and how should the business position itself

(Baden-Fuller, 1995). The other approach focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of resources

under the firm’s control. This offers a firm-focused conception of competitive advantage and

raises practical issues around how resources, such as labour, are managed; hence offering an

‘inside-out’ perspective (Barney, 1991). Known as the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, the

latter provides the theoretical basis on which to argue that HRM can of itself be a source of

sustained competitive advantage, thereby transforming HR costs from operating expenses into

capital investments capable of generating economic returns (Wright et al., 1994; Boxall and

Purcell, 2011: chapter 4).

The RBV approach, then, stresses the importance of getting the right fit between the desires

of the person and the demands of the job (Kristof-Brown et al., 2005). However, matching

people and jobs according to their learning capabilities has been neglected (Boxall, 2013). This

article plugs the gap. First, we develop and use survey measures that capture the learning

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits

use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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doi: 10.1111/1748-8583.12071

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 25 NO 3, 2015294

© 2015 The Authors. Human Resource Management Journal Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Please cite this article in press as: Felstead, A., Gallie, D., Green, F. and Inanc, H. (2015) ‘Fits, misfits and interactions: learning at work, job

satisfaction and job-related well-being’. Human Resource Management Journal 25: 3, 294–310.

demands of jobs and the learning dispositions of workers. Second, we examine how these job

and person characteristics correlate with facets of job satisfaction and with the level the

job-related well-being measured along Warr’s ‘Depression-Enthusiasm’ scale.1The article also

investigates how employees’ learning desires and the learning requirements of the job interact

to modify or amplify these correlations which can, in turn, lead to unwelcome personnel

problems for employers. These include high labour turnover, low productivity, high

absenteeism rates and low worker morale as shown by previous research (Freeman, 1978;

Green, 2010). According to the RBV approach the person–job learning fit is, therefore, an area

of HRM ripe for investigation because it can offer a means of delivering economic value.

The article is structured as follows. The second section briefly reviews existing research on

workplace learning, the disposition of learners and the person–job learning fit as well as the

theoretical bases of the concepts and hypotheses the article sets out to test. The third section

outlines the nature of the new data, paying particular attention to the survey items used to

derive the indices of the learning requirements of jobs and the learning dispositions of

employees. It also considers employees’ satisfaction with specific job aspects and their

job-related well-being. The fourth section presents the results in two ways. First, it maps how

learning requirements and employees’ dispositions to learning at work vary in Britain. Second,

it uses multivariate analysis to examine how strongly the job-holders’ satisfaction and

enthusiasm for the job correlates with: (a) the learning demands of the job; (b) the learning

disposition of the job-holder; and (c) the interaction of the two. The final section concludes the

article with a summary of its main findings and its implications.

THEORIES, CONCEPTS AND HYPOTHESES

It is widely recognised – not least by HR managers – that workplace learning arises in a variety

of settings that includes, but go beyond, formal training (Sfard, 1998; Hager, 2004). This

includes acquiring skills incidentally through the demands and challenges of everyday work

experience, and social interactions with colleagues, clients and customers. However, all forms

of learning are, to a large extent, bounded and defined by demands of the job. Some jobs

expand employees’ horizons, widen exposure to new thinking and promote experimentation.

In these circumstances, workers’ learning experiences are ‘expansive’. Other jobs emphasise the

importance of following set procedures and keeping within prescribed boundaries, hence

making learning more ‘restrictive’.

So far, however, the debate around this binary distinction has taken place either at a

theoretical level with discussion of its relationship to, and extension of, activity theory

(Engeström, 2001) or through workplace-level case studies (Fuller and Unwin, 2004; Cox, 2007;

Felstead et al., 2009). However, relatively few attempts have been made to capture the learning

permissiveness of jobs by building in appropriate questions into survey design (Kirby et al.,

2003; Skule, 2004; Felstead et al., 2005; Kitching, 2007). By developing the scales and survey

measures presented here, the article offers a distinctive and original contribution to this debate.

Because a substantial body of empirical research – especially of a quantitative variety – does

not yet exist, we therefore draw on associated literature to frame our thinking on how learning

demands may correlate with job satisfaction and job-related well-being.

The Hawthorne experiments of the 1920s suggest that allowing workers the scope to

experiment at work, take time out to learn new things and think about different ways of doing

the job is likely to make them feel special, and hence ceteris paribus to raise satisfaction levels

and job-related well-being (Mayo, 1945). Involving workers in other aspects of the job – such

as decisions about how tasks are to be carried out, what tasks are to be done, to what standards

Alan Felstead, Duncan Gallie, Francis Green and Hande Inanc

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 25 NO 3, 2015 295

© 2015 The Authors. Human Resource Management Journal Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.