NATURE OF WORK SATISFACTION: THE DIFFERENCES IN GENDER, AGE, TENURE AND MANAGEMENT POSITION AMONG ACADEMICS IN MALAYSIAN UNIVERSITIES

Job satisfaction is one of the key attitudes in reflecting the behaviour of workers at the workplace. It is constituted by many predictors including nature of work. This article analysed academics in higher education institutions satisfaction on nature of work and its differences based on demographic backgrounds. Using a simple random sampling technique, the researchers drew a sample of 1078 academics from three universities participating public universities in Malaysia. The findings indicated high level of satisfaction with nature of work among academics and there are differences of satisfaction level based on academics’ age, gender, tenure and management position. The variability of the current study’s findings with the past studies and job satisfaction theories, together with the implications of nature of work satisfaction among academics in higher education institutions are discussed.


INTRODUCTION
Academics in higher education of Malaysia are expected to uphold the nation's aspiration of achieving a world class education level and produce multi-skilled and competent individuals (Hashim, 2012). On top of that, academics are an important player in nurturing the government's aims for the harmonisation and oneness of its people that will then carry the aspiration of the nation towards being a fully developed country (Mohd Noor, Othman, Mustafa, Ahmad Sabri & Ali, 2019). Their contribution in disseminating knowledge and cultivating the value of research and innovation has always been scrutinised by the government, the industry and the society. As evidenced by recent key policy decisions, education in the country is being liberalised, as educational achievement is seen to be the cornerstone from which national prosperity can be constructed (Knight & Morshidi, 2011).
To summarise, global and national continuous development in education produces significant challenges for higher education and academics. Issues such as globalisation, internationalisation of education, societal and industrial demands, and government intervention policies are some of the variables that affect higher education and academics (Lasanowski, 2009). The socio-economic and political drivers of higher education might have a significant influence on academics' attitudes and behaviours. The impacts of these key issues and drivers on academics need to be vigilantly managed by the government and the universities, as academics may view them as burdens rather than as challenges (Mohd Noor, 2013).
In particular, higher education academics attitude of job satisfaction is important to the higher educational sector in Malaysia generally, and to the universities primarily. As reported in past research, it was consistently found that 'job satisfaction has significant impact on academics' excellent performance, high commitment, and low turnover' (Noordin & Jusoff, 2009). In creating job satisfaction, several important factors had been identified by scholars, researchers and theorists as significant ones including nature of work (See Mohd Noor et al., 2019). Nature of work satisfaction as asserted by Spector (1997) and Mohd Noor (2013) as satisfaction with the type of work done could also be understood as enjoyment of the actual tasks themselves had been predicted since long as a pertinent factor of overall job satisfaction. For instance, Akpofure, Ikhifa, Imide and Okoyoko (2006) found that nature of work is the most satisfying factor among college academics in Nigeria.
The paper is divided into four sections. The first section discusses the literature on the Islamic perspective on work and nature of work satisfaction. The second section confers the methodology used to investigate the state and level of nature of work satisfaction among academics in higher education institutions. The third section discusses the findings of the study and the last section manifests the conclusion and recommendations for future studies.

THE PERSPECTIVES ON WORK AND NATURE OF WORK
According to Beekun (1997), Islam emphasizes on a creative and productive effort as a source of happiness and accomplishment. This is due to the Islamic viewpoint of poverty as the promise of the devil, and prosperity as the promise of God, as Allah SWT has prescribed in the Qur'an: "The devil threatens you with poverty and bids you to conduct unseemly. God promised you His forgiveness and bounties."  Work is a dedicative effort striving to further self-economically, socially and psychologically, to sustain social prestige, to advance societal welfare and reaffirm faith. In other words, work as a means to safeguard the five essential human needs namely din (faith), nafs (human self), 'aql (intellect), nasl (posterity) and mal (wealth). So, it is very important for human beings to pursue whatever work is available whenever it is available subjected to the Will of Allah SWT as Allah has decreed in the Qur'an: "… disperse through the land and seek of the bounty of  The concept of work as an ibadah and jihad ascertain that the involvement and participation in economic activities (work) is not merely a mean to sustain a thriving and healthy society but also a divine call (Beekun, 1997).
Sincere intention will ensure that the work is effectively and efficiently following the revealed guidance which in turn contribute to the success in this world and hereafter (al-falah). From the responsibility aspect -Islam looks to all kind of occupations as fulfilment of contract freely entered into between the employer and the employed workers. For the self-employed, it is a contract between him and God. Every person who has faith, should carry his duty and work responsibility with full awareness towards Allah and accountable for his/her deeds in the hereafter (Kumar & Che Rose, 2010).
Islam regards perfect work and beneficial acts as clear indications as well as material products that are beneficial to the society for the correct faith. This is so, because someone will only do such a job with a good possession of Iman. Allah says in the Qur'an: "work or continue your work in the best form that you could, while the evaluation of your job belongs to Allah" (al-Taubah: 105). From the perspective of faith, Islam teaches us that no human effort will go unrecognized, unrewarded if good, unpunished if evil (al-Zalzalah, 6-8).
Few people would deny that the nature of work and employment has changed over the last four decades in many countries worldwide. Moreover, the nature of work is likely to continue to change as we move further into the 21st century (Barley, Bechky & Milliken, 2017). Consequently, it is surprising how little organization and management studies have had to say about the phenomenon. Our field's lack of attention to the ways in which work is changing is problematic because organization studies and organizational attitude and behavior grew out of industrial sociology and industrial and organizational psychology in the 1960s and 1970s. Both bodies of research were firmly rooted in the study of work in large organizations.
In regard to satisfaction with the nature of work, factors such as being attracted to teaching, students' academic achievements, and the positive nature of teaching and research were found to be the key contributors. It was found in the study conducted by Oshagbemi (1997), where university academics in the UK have a low to moderate level of satisfaction with nature of work, specifically in teaching, research, and administration and management. Aktaruzzaman, Clement and Hasan (2011) conducted a study among teachers of Technical Training Centers (T.T.Cs.) in Bangladesh found that the lecturers were dissatisfied with the nature of work in their institutions. Adekola (2012) in a study among employees (including academic staff) also found that there was a high volume of dissatisfaction among the respondents when it comes to nature of work in the universities. Next, in regards to the differences of nature of work satisfaction based on demographic variability, it was found by Okpara, Squillace and Erondu (2005) that females were more satisfied with the nature of work than males among university teachers in the United States. Okpara et al.'s (2005) study among academics in the United States of America's colleges and universities found that older academics were more satisfied with nature of work compared to the younger counterparts. No significant differences found between junior and senior academics in terms of tenure at the institution in Aktaruzzaman et al. (2011) and Adekola (2012) studies respectively. Another study by Rad and Yarmohammadian (2006) among academic employees in Iran found that those with management position were more satisfied with nature of work as compared to those without management position.
While the other academics in other countries displayed low to moderate level of satisfaction with the nature of work, the current study's finding will reflect the unique culture of the workplace in the Malaysian context. The specific issues occurred in the discussion among academics in the qualitative study conducted by Mohd Noor (2013) showed that Malaysian academics reflect the local culture that is shared together among Malaysian academics. For instance, in Malaysian culture, individualism is something that is not welcomed in any workplace including in the higher educational setting for instance in the teaching and learning process, thesis supervision, research and development activities, community services, and so on. Henceforth, academics in the Malaysian higher education institutions are keen to work collectively. The Ministry of Higher Education also actively promotes the culture of working collectively, as evidenced by the greater amount of research dollars available for groups of academics working together compared to those doing research individually (see Mohd Noor, 2013). Therefore, these findings had initiated two questions to be answered: First, what is the level of academics' overall satisfaction with nature of work? Second, what are the differences in nature of work satisfaction among academics by different type of demographic backgrounds of gender, age, tenure and management position in current university?

METHODOLOGY
The Deputy Vice Chancellor and the Registrar of all Malaysian public universities were contacted and invited by the researchers to encourage academic staff members' participation in the study. Consent for conducting the study had been given by three public universities in Malaysia. Academics from these three public higher education institutions of Malaysia were then selected as the population for the study. Using a simple random sampling technique, the researchers drew a sample of 1078 from the estimated 2900 academics in the three participating universities. These respondents represent 37.2 per cent of the overall samples. The respondents included a wide range of university faculties, departments and academic units in each participating university. Deans and head of each department, faculty and school in the participating universities were contacted through phone calls and emails to obtain their assistance on disseminating the cover letter of invitation to participate in the study, participation information sheet, and hyperlink for the online survey designed for the study to their academic staff members. The procedure of contacting those key persons was repeated three times, by no other mean, to keep reminding academics about the survey. The scale of 'Nature of Work Satisfaction' was used in the study in order to investigate academics' satisfaction with nature of work. Four items included in this measure were adapted from Spector (1997)'s Job Satisfaction Survey which measure nature of work satisfaction. Each respondent's completed survey was then automatically computed and saved, and the results were downloaded into SPSS 20.0 for quantitative analysis. Some items in these scales were negatively worded in order to maintain reliable answers from respondents. These negatively worded questions were then reversecoded before doing the reliability checking. All instruments except for demographic questionnaire were answered using a 5-point Likert scale of disagree very much (coded as 1), disagree (2), neither agree nor disagree (3), agree (4), and agree very much (5). The researchers created a questionnaire in order to collect data on the personal characteristics of the respondents. Measures of gender, age, tenure and management position in the university were included.
Descriptive analysis such as frequency, percentage and mean are used to explain the level of each of the variables included in the online study. To determine the level of nature of work satisfaction, frequencies and percentages of responses were calculated and mean and standard deviation results of satisfaction were analysed. The mean value of responses were computed and categorised into 3 interval level of responses accordingly to the work of Mohd Noor (2013). The interval level of responses were 1= low (mean score of 1.00-2.33), 2= moderate (2.34-3.67) and 3= high (3.68-5.00).
Mean comparison is used to identify the demographic influence on the responses. In this study, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and t-test are used to test whether there are significance differences on the level of nature of work satisfaction and the levels of the satisfaction between different demographic backgrounds of academics. Post-hoc tests were conducted after ANOVA was run in order to compare the differences of all investigated variables by different demographic backgrounds. For the purpose of comparing findings based on demographic backgrounds, the demographic variable was divided into several sub-groups. Gender was divided between male and female; age was divided into five groups according to their age (Group 1: 25 and under; Group 2: 26 to 35; Group 3: 36 to 45; Group 4: 46 to 55; Group 5: 56 and over). Respondents were also divided into four groups according to their tenure in the current university (Group 1: 10 years and under; Group 2: 11 to 20 years; Group 3: 21 to 30 years; Group 4: 31 years and over).

FINDINGS ON NATURE OF WORK SATISFACTION
This section describes the findings of academics' satisfaction with the nature of work in the quantitative study. The scale of 'Nature of Work Satisfaction' adapted from Spector (1997)'s JSS was used in the quantitative study in order to investigate academics' satisfaction with the nature of work.

Academics' Overall Satisfaction with the Nature of Work
The results of each questions used in the measure were depicted in Table 1. Responses for Question 1, the only negatively worded question to measure the nature of work, were reverse-coded. According to the results in the table below, strong results were shown in each question, where tendency of answers selected by respondents skewed towards either their agreements or disagreements. Based on Question 1, the majority of the respondents disagree that they sometimes feel their job are meaningless (Mean= 3.82, SD= 1.04). Furthermore, based on Question 2, a very high number of respondents like doing the things they do at work (f= 952, %= 88.3%). The majority of the respondents agree that they felt a sense of pride in doing their jobs (Mean= 4.22, SD= 0.62). Most of the respondents also thought that their jobs are enjoyable (Mean= 4.04, SD= 0.76). Mainly, the responses for most of the questions on the nature of work provided a high level of means which reflected a substantially high satisfaction among respondents on this organisational antecedent. In accordance to the findings in Table 1, a further analysis was undertaken to investigate the overall level of satisfaction with the nature of work. The result shows that the quantitative study respondents had a high level of satisfaction with the nature of work (Mean=4.06, SD=0.59). The findings of the quantitative study show that academics were highly satisfied with the antecedent of the nature of work, supporting the findings from the interviews in the qualitative analysis, where academics were mostly satisfied with this organisational antecedent.
These findings do not support the findings of Oshagbemi (1997), where he found that university academics in the UK have a low to moderate level of satisfaction with the nature of work, specifically in teaching, research, and administration and management. Also, the current study is contradicted with the findings of Aktaruzzaman et al. (2011) and Adekola (2012) where university academics in Bangladesh and Nigeria were dissatisfied with the nature of work at their universities.   Okpara et al. (2005) in the USA, where they found that female employees were more satisfied with the nature of work than male employees.   Table 4 shows the results of post-hoc analysis for satisfaction with the nature of work among academics by age groups. It is observed that the highest mean value of satisfaction was scored by those who were 56 and over (M=4.46, SD=0.46), while the lowest mean was scored by the group of 26 to 35 years old (M=3.95, SD=0.56).  Okpara et al. (2005) where they found that older academics in the United States colleges and universities have a higher level of satisfaction with the nature of work than the younger academic groups. Table 5 shows the ANOVA results for satisfaction with the nature of work among academics by tenure groups. The ANOVA test indicated that there was a statistically significant difference at the p<0.05 level in satisfaction among the four different tenure groups [F(3, 898)=10.98, p<0.05].  Table 6 shows the results of post-hoc analysis for satisfaction with the nature of work among academics by tenure groups. It is observed that the highest mean value of satisfaction scored by those who have worked for 31 years and above (M=4.75, SD=0.00), while the lowest mean scored by the group who have worked for 10 years and less (M=4.00, SD=0.59). * indicates significance at p<0.05 Post-hoc comparison using Tukey HSD test indicated that academics tenure between 21 to 30 years were significantly have higher mean of satisfaction compared to those who have worked between 11 to 20 years and 10 and under. No significant difference existed between academics in any of the other groups of tenure. Aktaruzzaman et al. (2011) and Adekola (2012) found no significant difference of satisfaction with the nature of work among tenure groups of academics in Bangladesh and Nigeria. Hence, the current study's findings contribute to the literature of satisfaction with the nature of work based on different tenure group. Table 7 shows the t-test results for satisfaction with the nature of work among academics by either holding management position or not. t-test results indicated that there was no significant difference in scores for academics that hold a management position (M=4.04, SD=0.57) and academics that do not hold a management position [M=4.05,SD=0.62;t (927)= 0.35,p=0.72]. Thus, the conclusion is no significant difference of satisfaction in terms of the nature of work between academics with and without management positions. The current study finding opposes the outcomes of Rad and Yarmohammadian (2006), where employees were significantly less satisfied with nature of the job compared to senior managers, middle managers, and first line managers in university hospitals in Iran.

DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS AND CONCLUSION
In regard to high satisfaction with the nature of work, factors such as being attracted to teaching, students' academic achievements, and the positive nature of teaching and research were found to be the key contributors. Furthermore, the quantitative findings oppose the findings of Oshagbemi (1997), where university academics in the UK have a low to moderate level of satisfaction with nature of work. While the other academics in other countries displayed low to moderate level of satisfaction with the nature of work, the current study's finding reflects the unique culture of the workplace in the Malaysian context. Specifically, in a qualitative study by Mohd Noor (2013)  A pertinent contribution of this research to the job satisfaction literature is the variation of findings based on the selected demographic backgrounds of age, gender, tenure, and management position among academics in public higher education institutions specifically on nature of work satisfaction. This is vital since very scarce attempts have been initiated in a comprehensive method research on the association between demographic variables with job satisfaction and intention to leave among academics particularly in Malaysian public higher educational setting.
University managers, as far as is reasonably possible, need to give academics sufficient control over the way in which they perform their duties (Villanueva & Djurkovic, 2009), which may require that particular attention be paid to job design approaches, such as skill utilization. Furthermore, university managers should attempt to ensure that their employees do not feel isolated or undervalued, and that they have the opportunity to attain an appropriate success in their career as compared to any other academics in the same university or from other universities (Mohd Noor, 2013).
From a managerial perspective, encouraging a high level of nature of work satisfaction is an essential part of retaining academic staff (Oshagbemi, 1997;Toker, 2011). As a means to alleviate turnover intentions, university managers may improve aspects of the academics' jobs including the nature of work. The extent to which employees feel that their job is pleasant and enjoyable is important, and for this, management must attempt to create a working environment that is conducive to job satisfaction (Villanueva & Djurkovic, 2009). For instance, Noordin and Jusof (2009) argue that it can be very difficult for university management to communicate with the majority of their academic staff. Conversations regarding an academic staff's nature of work and other variables can fall to the wayside, and in some instances, never take place (Noordin & Jusof, 2009). Hence, organisational climate surveys that occur on a scheduled basis (e.g., annually, biannually, etc.) can be a more efficient way for the management to gather important information especially on nature of work (Mohd Noor et al., 2019;Noordin & Jusof, 2009).
Another example is, as a reference to the concept of satisfaction in Herzberg's Hygiene-Motivator theory, university management may consider critical changes as a means of an elucidation such as job enrichment. Job enrichment provides more challenges with a greater sense of achievement and it ensures that interesting jobs are created (Villanueva & Djurkovic, 2009) especially in the sense of nature of work. In the common perspectives of university academics, this study found that high level of satisfaction among academics towards nature of work is essential to academics. Hence, as Villanueva and Djurkovic (2009) argue university managers should look to facilitate the development of a harmonious and supportive culture at the university. In particular this can be done by focussing on improving the operating conditions, policies of institution and responsibilities of academics. Evidenced by the findings in the current study, the university should at their best set up a good quality and sufficient quantity of facilities to support academics in doing their job well. Furthermore, comfortable working conditions, and optimum work responsibilities also should be carefully administered by the university in order to sustain satisfaction among academics including on their nature of work.