On the relationship between psychological empowerment and job satisfaction in military forces

Human resources play an important role in the success or failure of an organization, and the society’s development largely depends on improving its human resources. Job satisfaction and employees’ psychological empowerment are two concepts in line with the development of human resources. In this regard, we aimed to investigate the relationship between psychological empowerment and job satisfaction in the military forces. Totally, 300 armed force personnel (Sepah, Army, and Police) were selected using convenience sampling method, and the standardized questionnaires of job satisfaction (Job Descriptive Index: JDI) and psychological empowerment (Spreitzer) were used for data collection. Descriptive statistics as well as Pearson’s correlation and stepwise regression analysis were run using SPSS 16 for data analysis. The results showed that job satisfaction and psychological empowerment had a significant positive relationship (p=0.001). Also stepwise regression analysis showed that total psychological empowerment was the first and most important variable for predicting job satisfaction among the predictor variables, explaining %78 of the criterion variance. The variables of Influence, Competence, and Meaningfulness were respectively entered into the equation and were observed to explain 82%, 83%, and 81% of the criterion variance, respectively. It was observed that higher psychological empowerment was associated with higher levels of job satisfaction among armed force personnel.