What Makes Workers Happy? Anticipated Rewards And Job Satisfaction

Using data collected from over 9400 employees in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Serbia, across a wide variety of workplaces and sectors, we identify the extrinsic and intrinsic rewards that workers desire and expectations of receiving these rewards. We use ordered probit regression analysis to evaluate the association between anticipated rewards and job satisfaction, hypothesizing that reward desirability matters most for extrinsic rewards linked to numeric values. Data strongly support our hypothesis in the case of expected job security; limited support is found in the case of expected promotion. For non-numeric extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, a strong positive link between job satisfaction and the reward variables often is observed, even if the expected reward is not highly desired. While own earnings typically are positively linked to job satisfaction, peers' earnings may be positively (Kazakhstan, Armenia, Russia) or negatively (Krygyzstan, Serbia) linked to job satisfaction, but not always statistically significant.