The Relationship between Nonsupervisory Employees' Self-Assessment of Their Supervisory Skills and the Amount of Satisfaction They Believe They Would Receive from Being a Supervisor
Abstract
This descriptive study investigated the relationship between perceived supervisory effectiveness (competence) and perceived supervisory satisfaction for nonsupervisory professional-technical employees who may aspire to supervisory positions. The study participants are employees of a large industrial company engaged in the engineering and manufacturing of diversified products for the automotive industry. Specifically, the study attempted to (a) collect employee self-assessment data regarding the employee's perceived supervisory job effectiveness and perceived job satisfaction, (b) determine whether a relationship existed between perceived supervisory effectiveness and satisfaction, and (c) determine if the employee's age and educational level were influencing factors.
In order to investigate the relationship between perceived supervisory effectiveness and satisfaction, hypotheses were presented which dealt with overall supervisory ability and also with each of the seven supervisory ability areas. Additionally, hypotheses dealing with the potential influence age and education may have on the perceived supervisory effectiveness and satisfaction assessments were presented for testing.
A major conclusion of the study was that there exists a direct relationship between perceived supervisory effectiveness and satisfaction for nonsupervisory profession-technical employees. This relationship was present for each of the seven supervisory ability areas as well as for the overall supervisory job assessment. It was further found that the research hypotheses suggesting that age and education were factors which influenced a person's perceived supervisory effectiveness and satisfaction assessments could not be supported.
Organizations typically use job competence as the most important and often sole criterion when selecting employee candidates to fill supervisory openings. The findings of this study support the use of perceived job satisfaction as an additional criterion to use in making the supervisory candidate screening decision. The use of age and education as screening criteria was not supported in this study.