A causal model for employee satisfaction

Abstract

Employees are recognized as the most crucial asset of today's organizations by both academics and practitioners. The importance of employees is also reflected in the EFQM Excellence Model, since two of the criteria deal with employee - related issues (i.e. 'people' and 'people results'). The EFQM Excellence Model is by far the most widely used model for self - assessment in Europe, but there is no knowledge about the relationships between the enabler criteria and the most crucial of the results criteria: 'people results'. In this paper a frame of reference for employee satisfaction is constructed by comparing the EFQM Excellence Model and Hackman and Oldham's Work Design Model. This comparison has revealed a number of causal relationships between the enabler criteria and 'people results'. These causal relationships have been tested empirically through the Structural Equation Model and the results indicate that the enablers from the EFQM Excellence Model have a positive effect on the criterion 'people results'.