Gender Differences in Job Satisfaction, Altruism, and Belief in a Just World among Public Sector Employees

Abstract

During COVID-19, which witnessed a shift from offline to online, working jobs to losing jobs, increasing salary to cutting of salaries, sound health to threat of psychological risks, it is important to reconsider work related aspects for study, post pandemic. In the pre-COVID era, existing research among public sector employees, have found that men are more satisfied with their jobs when compared to women (Webber & Rogers, 2018) and organizational citizenship behavior positively influences Organizational Justice and Job satisfaction. (Singh & Singh, 2019). This research aims to dig deeper into the difference in gender in the context of job satisfaction, Altruism, and belief in a Just World for public sector employees with the COVID-19. The Sample consists of 147 individuals in the public sector (51 females and 96 males) aging between 18-60 years residing in India. Three different scales, namely Belief in a Just world by (Lucas, Zhdanova, & Alexander, 2011), Job satisfaction Survey by (Spector,1994), and Adapted Version of the Self-Report Altruism Scale by P.C. Ruston (original), Peter Witt and Chris Boleman (adapted version), were administered on the subjects to assess the above three variables. Data was tested for normality, ‘t’ test and Mann-Whitney U test. Results indicate that there is no significant gender difference with respect to job satisfaction, altruism, belief in a just world. Although, there was a significant relationship found with respect to job satisfaction among the sub groups of Agriculture and Allied (AA), Administration (AD), Specialist (SP), and Extension (EX). The findings from this study help us comprehend the gender differences in the public work sector in the Indian context and a potential need for further research to decode if at all the three variables are correlated to one another and can be used in the coming times for predicting prosocial behavior.