Abstract
This paper uses life satisfaction regressions based on three surveys in two countries (Canada and the United States) to estimate the relative values of financial and non-financial job characteristics. The well-being results show strikingly large values for non-financial job characteristics, especially workplace trust and other measures of the quality of social capital in workplaces. For example, an increase of trust in management that is about one tenth of the scale has a value in terms of life satisfaction equivalent to an increase of more than 30% in monetary income. We find that these values differ significantly by gender and by union status. We consider the reasons for such large values, and explore their implications for employers, employees, and policy-makers.
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Notes
If a version of Eq. 1 is estimated using all six job characteristics and three education level variables, the sign patterns are as described in the text. Of the ‘correctly’ (negatively) signed job characteristics, “free of conflicting demands” is insignificant.
As pointed out by a referee, health status is a highly endogenous variable. Our purpose for including it is two-fold: to account separately for the importance of subjective health as a determinant of life satisfaction, and to help control for possible interpersonal differences in optimism. Excluding the health variable from the regression raises the coefficients on income and on job satisfaction slightly. But the ratio between the two is little changed. In the case of ESC full-sample estimation in column 1 of Table 1, the ratio changes from 0.93 with the health variable included to 0.94 without.
An instrument variable ideally will incorporate external information other than an individual worker’s own responses to survey questions to avoid endogeneity. In the case of Bryson et al. (2004), such external information is managers’ evaluations of industrial relations in the establishments where respondents are employed. Our surveys provide little external information.
In the fourth column of Table 2, which has the regression result for female workers, the coefficient on the standardized trust in management is 1.25 times as large as the coefficient on the log of personal income. This implies that we can multiply the difference in standardized trust by 1.25 to turn it into income-equivalent units. The gender difference in the average assessment of trust in management is 0.13, with females being higher. The difference amounts to 0.057 standardized units. The corresponding income-equivalent value is therefore 0.057 × 1.25 = 0.071. The gender difference in personal income per hour of work is 0.19, with females being lower. Therefore the difference in workplace trust contributes almost two-fifths (0.071/0.19 = 0.37) of the gender difference in hourly earnings.
There has been increasing interest in the topic within the human resources research community. For example, a 2003 special issue of the International Journal of Human Resource Management was devoted to workplace trust. See Ziffane and Connell (2003). For a survey of some of the related research in psychology, see Kramer (1999).
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Helliwell, J.F., Huang, H. Well-Being and Trust in the Workplace. J Happiness Stud 12, 747–767 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-010-9225-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-010-9225-7