Communications and Job Satisfaction: — A Case Study of an Airline's Cabin Crew Members

Despite all that has been written about organisational communications, its relationship to job satisfaction has received little attention. There are at least three notable exceptions. Likert was probably one of the first management writers to specifically identify communications as having an important effect on job satisfaction. In his causal sequence model, Likert relates communications to job satisfaction in terms of functioning as the intervening variable, being effected by the causal variables of leadership, organisational climate and organisational structure . Downs produces a multi‐dimensional construct which he calls “communication satisfaction”, which he then operationalises and correlates with a measure of job satisfaction, across six organisations. He found that the communication factors which correlated with job satisfaction varied somewhat, but that there was a general trend for communication climate, personal feedback and relationship with superior to correlate most with job satisfaction, (personal communication). More recently, Schuler related communications to job satisfaction through a role perceptual transactional process model. His results suggested that organisational communications, role perceptions and job satisfaction are reciprocally related and that role perceptions intervene in the communications—job satisfaction relationship. Whilst these three studies agree that the communications job satisfaction link is both a significant and positive one, none of them really explicates the role of communications vis‐à‐vis other work factors in determining job satisfaction. This is the aim of this case study, which was developed over a twelve‐month period by means of a series of unstructured interviews with members of cabin crew management, and a structured questionnaire with a sample of cabin crew members.