Sens du travail et satisfaction au travail chez le personnel de l’Etat employé dans les services déconcentrés de la fonction publique camerounaise

Abstract

Job satisfaction is defined as a state of cognitive and affective contentment linked to a particular aspect of work, or to work as a whole. Over the last three decades in particular, the theme of job satisfaction has occupied a fairly privileged position in scientific production (Randon, 2012). Two types of determinants have been identified in this sense, namely elements taken from the work environment and those already found in the individual himself (Aubin, 2008). This study is based on the observation that vacuity and apathy can be explained by the dissatisfaction of needs and expectations that affects most workers in our country (Nyock Ilouga et al. 2018), and tends to be widespread among government employees who display withdrawal behaviours. With this in mind, we raised the issue of job dissatisfaction among Cameroon's civil servants. Our aim was to establish the link between the meaning of work and job satisfaction. We conducted a questionnaire survey among 191 employees of decentralized public administration services. Four operational hypotheses were validated: HR1: perceived job understanding increases intrinsic job satisfaction (β =.312; p=.000); HR2: perceived job understanding decreases extrinsic job satisfaction (β =.306; p=.000); HR3: perceived social usefulness of work increases intrinsic job satisfaction (β=.277; p=.000); HR4: perceived social usefulness of work increases extrinsic job satisfaction (β =.328; p=.000). These results show that the contribution of perceived job meaning to the evaluation of job satisfaction is highly significant. Thus, these results also indicate that the meaning of work is another little-explored determinant in the explanation of job satisfaction. With this in mind, it makes sense to look at the meaning of work if we want to understand job satisfaction.