Job Satisfaction of the Teaching Staff in Russian Universities: From a Retrospective Analysis of Approaches to Modern Conceptualizaton

The article is devoted to the reception and rethinking of the concept of job satisfaction developed by Soviet sociologists in the late 1960’s. It criticizes the currently accepted approach, which puts forward wages as the main factor of job satisfaction (N.V. Rudakov, 2021; O. Rotar, B.E. Sarmiento, 2022). Other approaches that consider a broader set of satisfaction factors remain significantly dependent on the dominant financial-pragmatic framework (E.B. Mikhalkina, et. al, 2020; G.Z. Efimova, A.S. Latyshev, 2023). Based on a retrospective analysis, the authors propose an updated concept of job satisfaction. It is tested on the data of a long-term monitoring study of the teaching staff of Russian universities, conducted by the Presidential Academy. The data from the sixth wave of this monitoring (the survey was conducted online by the authors of the article from April 18 up to and including June 10, 2023, 16,581 complete questionnaires were collected) are analyzed. A higher education teacher’s total family income and teacher’s wage are considered as significant factors in overall job satisfaction, but the most important conceptual attributes of satisfaction are the creative capacity and the content of a job. The first attribute is determined by a set of operational definitions that reflect perceptions of the world and confidence in one’s own professional position. The second is determined by the perceptions of the educational system and whether a person is seeking freedom of creativity.