Exploring Relationship among Spiritual Quotient, Personal Competence and Job Satisfaction of Employees by Sukhwinder Kaur and Sukhdev Singh.

Many studies have been conducted to investigate the field of organizational theory and behaviors as depicted by the researchers in the study of the literature. One of the study’s strengths is that the domains of job satisfaction, personal competency, and employee motivation have been extensively researched, allowing the researchers to discover research gaps in these areas as well as a conceptual model. The use purposive sampling technique is also an advantage as the researchers have included respondents from different banks and regions to reduce the bias effect on the outcome of the study. Other strengths of the study include the use of statistical methods to test the hypothesis and general presentation of results in tables. However, the study’s weakness is the omission of important information, such as methodology used and software used for data collection and analysis respectively.

Discussion of central questions and main thesis

There are two central questions of this study: How does the employees’ Spiritual Quotient correlate with their personal competence? (1) How does employees’ personal competence correlate with their job satisfaction? (2) This study seeks to address these questions and recommend the direction of the future research. The main hypothesis of this study is that Spiritual Quotient has direct relation with personal competence. The researchers also wanted to test the hypothesis that personal competence has a mediating effect on the correlation between job satisfaction and the Spiritual Quotient.

Methodology

The most significant procedures the researcher adopted to test the study’s hypotheses is mixed method – the use of both qualitative and quantitative data. The researchers used questionnaires to collect data and statistical tools used to analyze the data and test the hypothesis. I think the methods used are the only appropriate, but also best suited for this study as there is no better alternative to test hypotheses rather than statistical methods (regression and Pearson’s correlation analysis). The study used 376 participants from various regions and I think this sample population was enough to represent the population – as respondents were drawn from two major banks, public and private-sector banks. However, I do not think that the respondents were drawn from appropriate population because they came from two banks and did not represent many companies. Another problem is that the researchers do not mention the statistical software they used for data analysis.

Findings

The researchers found that there is a positive correlation between Spiritual Quotient and personal competency and reverse is true. All personal competency predictors, such as adaptability, leadership skills, knowledge, accountability, and communication, have a positive relationship with employees’ Spiritual Quotient. Additionally, the study indicated that personal competence has a positive significant relationship with job satisfaction. The researchers also found that personal competence has a strong mediating effect on the relation between employees’ Spiritual Quotient and their job satisfaction. The findings strongly support the hypothesis and all hypotheses were verified. I think that the statistical methods, correlation and regression analysis, used to test these hypotheses were most appropriate given the nature of the study. However, the only problem is the analysis model – they used simple linear regression model, rather than multivariate regression model to comprehensively evaluate the mediating variables. I think the results of the study supported the thesis of the researchers by verifying the hypothesis.

Conclusion

The study has concluded that spirituality has a positive and significant relationship three measures of employees’ personal competency: decision making skills, adaptability, and interpersonal skills. These measures of personal competency help the employees to be effective in their roles in both professional and social life. Spirituality has also been found to have a moderate but a positive relationship with other measures of personal experience: leadership skills, accountability, communication, and knowledge and skills. The study ultimately concluded that Spiritual Quotient has high indirect relationships with the level of job satisfaction in the presence of personal competency as a mediator. The research affects the existing literature by contributing its finding to the vast body of literature on personal competency, job satisfaction, and spirituality of the employees. The study also promotes future research in a consistent direction for the future researchers to evaluate whether the employees with high personal competency can be assigned higher roles that what they are currently doing – research on job enrichment and enlargement for personally competent employees. I think that the conclusions of this study are legitimate and scientifically valid because it used scientific methods in data collection and analysis.

Audience

The audience of this study includes senior managers and human resource managers and will benefit them by designing spiritual orientation programmes to enable employees become more competent and satisfied with their jobs. The study also informs them that the employees can be frustrated and dissatisfied with their jobs when personal competence is not compatible with job requirements in relation to skills, knowledge, and attitudes.

Generalization of results

In reference to this study, the results cannot be generalized for a number of reasons. First, the study included only two organizations, a public and a private one, and though it covered several regions, its results cannot be extended to cover other companies. Second, the study was done on two organizations with the same banking industry and this means that the results of this study cannot be generalized to companies in other industries. Also, the results of this study cannot be generalized to other companies in different parts of the world as it was done in India.

Variables

The independent variable in this study is personal competency and they manipulated spirituality and job satisfaction. The measures of personal competency that manipulated spirituality and the level of job satisfaction include decision making skills, adaptability, and interpersonal skills, leadership skills, accountability, communication, and knowledge and skills