Control and job satisfaction

Job satisfaction has been found to affect firm commitment, absenteeism, turnover and therefore firm productivity. Automatically, this stresses the importance of what drives job satisfaction. One potential driver of job satisfaction to which little research has been conducted is control. In this paper, I define control as discretion, the control one has over him- or herself in doing his or her work, and supervisory control, the control one has over others in his or her work. Using both a panel dataset (LPP) and a repeated cross-sectional dataset (EWCS), I find that discretion and supervisory power are positively related to job satisfaction. In addition, there is some evidence that the relation between supervisory power and job satisfaction is inversely u-shaped. Moreover, the results suggest that the degree to which employees enjoy supervisory power is determined by their cultural background. Lastly, I find some indication that women draw more satisfaction from supervisory power as compared to men. This difference, however, is not statistically significant.