Age differences, proactive personality, coping strategies, job stress and job satisfaction among employees in outsourcing companies in Malaysia

The job satisfaction in outsourcing industry is depleting globally due to its extensive job stress on employees, challenging environment and rapid economic growth. A study showed that employees in Malaysia only scored 17.8% on the very satisfied categories which infers that most of the employees in Malaysia are experiencing very low percentage of satisfaction as compared to neighbouring countries such as Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. To date, the research on outsourcing industry is still limited in Malaysia. Proactive personality and coping strategies are known to have direct relationship with job stress and job satisfaction. Age differences is also an important factor in development psychology to study job satisfaction. Hence, the present study examines the job stress, proactive personality, coping strategies, age differences and job satisfaction among employees in outsourcing companies in Malaysia. Outsourcing companies that have MSC status and provide diverse outsourcing services were the target of this study. Target respondents were employees aged between 25 to 56 years old in the selected outsourcing companies in Klang Valley. Respondents need to have at least a tertiary education level, holding position at executive level and above with at least one year experience to participate in this study. Respondents were selected through multistage cluster sampling method. A total of 245 respondents participated in this study. The four instruments used in this study were the Spector’s (1994) Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS), Siegrist, Li and Montano’s (2014) short version of Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI), Seibert, Crant and Kraimer’s (1999) Proactive Personality Scale (PPS), and Carver’s (1997) Brief COPE. Data analysis included univariate, bivariate and multivariate statistics. The Pearson correlation result indicated that age, marital status, length of service, job stress, proactive personality and coping strategies were significantly correlated with job satisfaction. The multiple regression showed that age, length of service, job stress, proactive personality and coping strategies significantly predicted the job satisfaction. The results further revealed that proactive personality had significant moderating effect in the relationship between job stress and job satisfaction. Job satisfaction of proactive employees was highly affected by job stress compared to low proactive employee. Result showed that high proactive personality of employees in outsourcing company did not increase the job satisfaction when they were facing higher job stress. Moreover, results also revealed that problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping had partial mediating effect on the relationship between job stress and job satisfaction. Results further indicated that the respondents using problem-focused coping had higher job satisfaction, while respondents using emotion-focused coping had lower job satisfaction. This study can be implemented in outsourcing companies to pay attention to the problem of the negative relationship between job stress and job satisfaction. Findings also implied that the proactive personality at workplace draws negative impact while problem-focused coping strategies could reduce the negative drawbacks of stress on employees in outsourcing company. The current conceptual model serves as a reference to analyse different job stress definition and job satisfaction aspects particularly for employees in outsourcing in the near future.

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