Explaining and Understanding Employee Satisfaction and Leadership within the Market and Social Research Industries in Gauteng Province Using Path and Strategic Impact Analyses

This paper is based on the data used for the completion of Doctor of Business Leadership degree submitted at University of South Africa. The purpose of this paper is to identify how demographic information and factors derived from factor analysis affect employee satisfaction in the Market and Social Research Industries in Gauteng Province, South Africa. The data were collected face-to-face from ordinary employees using a quantitative questionnaire. An overall Cronbach alpha of 0.982 showed that the questionnaire used in the study was statistical reliable.

Path analysis is used in this paper. It helps to understand the effect of indirect effects on employee satisfaction within the Market and Social Research industries in Gauteng. Further, the path analysis showed that overall leadership style of the leader affects employee satisfaction directly while overall leadership style was strongly driven by leader's motivator attributes. On the other hand, de-motivator leadership attributes tend to negatively affect overall leadership style of the leader. Day-to-day working conditions and co-worker attributes (all derived from employee/job related attributes) directly drove overall employee satisfaction of the respondents.