Factors Affecting Happiness of a Public University Staff: Case of Qualitative Research
Nuray TuranBir Kamu Üniversitesi Personelinin Çalışma Mutluluğunu Etkileyen Faktörler: Nitel Araştırma Örneği
Nuray TuranAim
The working environment is an area where people spend most of their lives and it has many direct and indirect effects on their lives. In this area, it is inevitable that a number of psychological and physical factors affect the person. The happier the person is in the working environment (assuming it is appropriate under other conditions), the efficiency, performance and success will also increase accordingly; and the more unhappy the person, the lower the productivity, performance and success. Therefore, it is important for employees to be aware of what needs to be done to ensure their happiness at work, whether they are private or public organizations. For this; a policy should be developed according to the factors that affect happiness at work. But, it can be said that the factors affecting happiness at work in the research conducted up to this day are not very scientific, or are used in the same sense as job satisfaction, and the lack of much work for public organizations in particular, is a deficiency in this field. Whence, the aim of this study is to reveal the factors affecting happiness at work of the academic and administrative staff of the university.
Method
In this study, the structured interview method, which is one of qualitative research methods, is used. The reason why the structured interview method is preferred is to get the opinions of the academic and administrative staff about the factors affecting their happiness at work, to get the opinions of the interviewee without asking and directing the same number and the same content, to reveal the similarities and differences in these views and to make comparisons. The universe of the research consists of the academic and administrative staff of a public university. Participants were selected from the academic and administrative staff of this university by the simple random sampling method. Of the participants, 23 were male and 14 were female. The average age is 36.8 years. 22 of the employees are academicians and 15 are administrative staff. In the first phase of the study, a literature review was conducted regarding happiness at work, and factors affecting happiness at work, behind 7 questions were introduced to be used in the research. Afterwards, opinions were taken from two academicians on the subject, in terms of the suitability of the interview questions. The necessary corrections and arrangements were made according to these returns, and after the questions were deemed valid and sufficient, a pilot study was carried out with two academicians and administrative staff before the research was conducted, and the main study was carried out after the pilot study. In the final form of the interview form, 7 questions and demographic variables were included.
Findings
The factors affecting happiness at work became evident as personal, environmental, work-related attitudes, relationship-related and managerial factors. Among these factors, the most important factor affecting happiness at work for the academic staff is the attitude towards work, while the least important factor is the relationship-related factor. The most important factor for administrative staff is managerial; the least important is the environmental factor. In addition, job satisfaction has emerged as a result of happiness at work. In addition, the frequency of the factors affecting happiness at work is differentiated between academicians and administrative staff. Another remarkable result is; job satisfaction has emerged as a result of the happiness of working. The participant expressions of the managerial factors to the affect happiness at work also allowed the classification of leadership characteristics.
Conclusion
As a result; the working environment is a physical space where the person works, where he earns money and where he is employed. A work environment with a robust infrastructure, a healthy environment, appropriate security measures, appropriate working hours, important rules and safety procedures for employees at all levels will provide better efficiency for the organization (Sharma and Jain, 2018). For these reasons, it is thought that the findings of the research will provide a comparison for the factors affecting happiness at work of the academic and administrative staff, while also providing a prediction for the areas to be developed in this regard. In addition, it is expected to provide each university factors for investigations affecting happiness at work within itself, and create a resource for them to make improvements with the development required in this regard is important, and benefits in Turkey for future research. For this reason, it can be suggested that future studies related to happiness at work should be done in other universities and that the studies can be enriched by comparing happiness at work public and private universities. In addition, research can be done according to occupations. Thus, the subject will be improved and deepened, and original scientific studies will emerge.
