A Study on The Learning Climate and Job Satisfaction of Nurses and IT Employees

Organizational learning in purview of the general definitions is the various practices followed by the employer from an employee’s point of view to facilitate learning at workplace. Training climate has been defined as a short-time instrumental variable capable of guaranteeing learning objectives, constituted by work-related factors that may influence training success and failure and the effectiveness of formal and informal training activities. Workplace identity refers to the psychological relationship between the individual and the organization, or rather the specific division where one works. Job Satisfaction is usually treated as a collection of feelings or affective responses associated with the job situation, or “simply how people feel about different aspects of their jobs”. The purpose of this paper was to explore if and to what extent workplace identity can mediate the relationship between learning climate dimensions and job satisfaction in a group of trainees. Sample of 30 each was taken from two types of sectors within the service industry. This was to see if these sectors within the service industry exhibit similar behavior. Keywords: Workplace identity, learning climate, job satisfaction


INTRODUCTION
Training and Learning Climate: "Training climate has been defined as a short-time instrumental variable capable of guaranteeing learning objectives, constituted by work-related factors that may influence training success and failure and the effectiveness of formal and informal training activities." (Michela Cortini ,2016). For this study, learning climate can be described as "reflecting the space for learning in an organization (Ortenblad, 2002) and is related to the perceptions about what helps or hinders organizational and individual learning" (Mikkelsen et al.,1998). More than 70 studies have supported and followed the above concepts of learning climate. In the review of literature, researchers have proposed various measures of training climate and learning; however this work takes into account the instrument developed by Nikolova et al (2014), which has the dimensions of facilitation, appreciation and error avoidance consisting of just nine items, and showing very good psychometric properties. These measures showed high Cronbach's alpha reliability levels(the indexes go from 0.83 to 0.86).The respondents express an opinion on a seven-point Likert scale representing levels of agreement, resulting in a very easy-to-use instrument.

Workplace Identity:
Workplace identity refers to the psychological relationship between the individual and the organization, or rather the specific division where one works. (Michela Cortini ,2016)."Workplace identity is an individual's central and enduring status and distinctiveness categorizations in the workplace. These role categorizations include both personal categorizations (e.g.,'I'm an efficient worker') and social categorizations(e.g.,I'm a high-status professional,) (Elsbach,2004)".This concept of workplace identity is followed and supported in more than 64 studies. Job Satisfaction: Job Satisfaction is usually treated as a collection of feelings or affective responses associated with the job situation, or "simply how people feel about different aspects of their jobs" (Spector, 1997: 2). In 1967, Weiss et al. developed the short version of the MSQ -Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire, a 5-point Likert-type scale with 20 items. This scale has been widely used in the literature being a well-known and stable over the time instrument with previous researches yielding excellent coefficient alpha.

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM
The Indian literature showing the attempts to evaluate the mediating effects of workplace identity on job satisfaction and learning climate during the initial years of employment are scarce. Although a certain number of papers analyse some of these relationships, as shown in the following sections, what makes the current work different from previous ones is the use of an integrated model which stands out for the fact of covering both organizational (learning climate) and individual dimensions (workplace identity) capable of impacting employees' job satisfaction. In addition, at least to our knowledge, the present paper represents the first attempt to study these relationships within the trainee context. However, the impact of providing a positive workplace identity to the new employees will most probably have a seemingly positive impact on them in a long run. Thereby attempts have been made to find the correlation between these factors and how they bring in the positive outcomes in the organization.

OBJECTIVES
1. To understand the concept and importance of workplace identity in an organization. 2. To study the different dimensions of learning climate in an organization. 3. To measure work place identity, different dimensions of learning climate and job satisfaction of employees in an organization. 4. To determine the effect of learning climate during the early years on job satisfaction of employees. 5. To explore the mediating effects of work life identity on the relationship between job satisfaction and learning climate of employees 6. To determine the impact of learning climate dimensions on job satisfaction and mediating effects of work life identity on the relationship between learning climate and job satisfaction is the same/different within two sectors of service industry.

DATA COLLECTION SOURCES:
For the purpose of obtaining information regarding the staff, both primary data as well as secondary data are collected. Primary data are collected by making the staff fill in the structured questionnaire. Secondary data are collected from various books, magazines, journals and Internet etc.

SAMPLE DESIGN:
A sample of 30 nurses was taken from private hospitals in Ernakulam and 30 IT employees from IT organizations in Ernakulam. In both cases staff having not less than one year of experience and not more than five years of experience were chosen. A stratified sampling technique was used to collect information from staff to analyze the workplace identity, learning climate, job satisfaction, and the relation between these variables.

TOOLS OF ANALYSIS:
Data were collected using a structured questionnaire. Appropriate statistical techniques were used for analysis and interpretation.

Results:
The following Table presents the preliminary analysis of the data set: the means, standard deviations.

SIMPLE REGRESSION ANALYSIS TO DETERMINE THE IMPACT OF LEARNING CLIMATE DIMENSIONS ON JOB SATISFACTION.
The p-value for each term tests the null hypothesis that the coefficient is equal to zero (no effect). A low pvalue (< 0.05) indicates that you can reject the null hypothesis. In other words, a predictor that has a low pvalue is likely to be a meaningful addition to your model because changes in the predictor's value are related to changes in the response variable.Conversely, a larger (insignificant) p-value suggests that changes in the predictor are not associated with changes in the response.

REGRESSION ANALYSIS TO DETERMINE THE IMPACT OF LEARNING CLIMATE DIMENSIONS (INDEPENDENT) ON THE JOB SATISFACTION (DEPENDENT VARIABLE) IN THE CASE OF IT EMPLOYEES.
As seen above, in the case of IT employees only appreciation seems to have an impact on the job satisfaction whereas facilitation to learning and error avoidance doesn't seem to have an impact on job satisfaction.

REGRESSION ANALYSIS TO DETERMINE THE IMPACT OF LEARNING CLIMATE DIMENSIONS (INDEPENDENT) ON THE JOB SATISFACTION (DEPENDENT VARIABLE) OF NURSES.
In the case of nurses, both facilitation to learning and appreciation has an impact on job satisfaction but error avoidance doesn't seem to have an impact and as zero is not in the 95 per cent for IT employees CI, we can conclude that the indirect effect is significantly different from zero at p<0.05, and that, as predicted, change in workplace identity mediates the relationship between training support and job satisfaction but for nurses it is not significant. and as zero is not in the 95 per cent for nurses CI, we can conclude that the indirect effect is significantly different from zero at p<0.05, and that, as predicted, change in workplace identity mediates the relationship between training support and job satisfaction but for IT employees it is insignificant. and as zero is not in the 95 per cent for IT employees and nurses CI, we can conclude that the indirect effect is significantly different from zero at p<0.05, and that, as predicted, change in workplace identity mediates the relationship between training support and job satisfaction.
The bracketed values are of nurse sample.The values for both IT and nurses are similar. The study suggests that it was found that workplace identity significantly mediated the relation between organizational support for training and job satisfaction,change in workplace identity mediates the relationship between training support and job satisfaction. It was also found that workplace identity significantly mediated the relation between appreciation for training and job satisfaction, and that, aspredicted, change in workplace identity mediates the relationship between appreciation for training and job satisfaction in apprenticeship. In addition, it was found that workplace identity significantly mediated the relation between error avoidance and job, and that change in workplace identity mediates the relationship between error avoidance and job satisfaction in apprenticeship.

Suggestions:
Other studies have stressed the important role that workplace identity can play in job satisfaction development (Porter et al., 1974;Maier and Brunstein, 2001), focusing on expert workers. When one talks about apprenticeship, there may be the risk of not taking into account the role of workplace identity, since, in view of the fact that apprentices are always newcomers or, at any rate workers with very limited tenure, they are not thought to have yet developed workplace identity. The above results on the contrary, seem to suggest the need for organizational identification starting from the earliest relationships between employer and employee. In such a sense, it seems mandatory to develop training plans aiming at a time to focus on both professional and social skill focused on organizational socialization that has been acknowledged to be an important predictor of work place identity.