A Structural Model of Antecedents and Consequences of Satisfaction with Growth and Development

Because downsizing and re-organizing have altered the social contract between employers and employees, employees have found additional incentive to grow and develop by adding to their portfolio of skills. In order to establish the validity of satisfaction with growth and development, an hypothesized model is tested and compared with competing models. 'our hundred and sixty three employees from a large southeastern city completed a questionnaire that examined attitudes regarding satisfaction with growth and development, general job satisfaction, and hypothesized antecedents (i.e., context and individual variables) and consequences (i.e., organizational commitment) of satisfaction with growth and development. LISREL VIII (Joreskog & Sorbom, 1993) was employed to examine the measurement models and structural models of the hypothesized and competing models, and statistical tests for differences between the structural models were conducted. The hypothesized structural model provided a significantly better fit to the data than the model without satisfaction with growth and development, and fit the data as well as another competing model. These results indicate that considering satisfaction with growth and development as a construct. separate from general job satisfaction adds explanatory information regarding organizational commitment, and allows for insight regarding the impact of antecedents on satisfaction with growth and development.