Are we happy with our work in globalization? Globalization experience, achievement motivation, and job seniority as predictors of work satisfaction in a group of office workers

BACKGROUND: The main aim of this study was to determine whether globalization experience is a predictor of work satisfaction. In addition, we inspected a regression model consisting of globalization experience, job seniority, and goal achievement to determine how much variance in work satisfaction is accounted for by globalization experience. Most the theoretical texts about globalization suggest its negative impact on everyday life. The negative effects are – work–life balance problem, weakening of mechanisms to protect against the fear of death, and uncertainty. METHOD: 250 office workers participated in the study (M(age) = 38.37; 145 females and 105 males). They responded to paper-and-pencil anonymous questionnaires measuring globalization experience, achievement goals, and work satisfaction. Respondents were also asked about their job seniority. We used Spearman’s rho correlations and multiple linear regression to check the basic linear relation between variables, and hierarchical multiple regression to determine which of them is the strongest predictor of work satisfaction. RESULTS: The results indicated that globalization experience (R(2) change = 0.089; p < .05) is a statistically significant negative predictor of work satisfaction and job seniority (R(2) change = 0.056; p < .05) while achievement goals (R(2) change = 0.188; p < .001) are positive predictors of work satisfaction. CONCLUSION: We concluded that further research on globalization experience is necessary because it is the precursory individualistic approach to globalization research and we obtained a statistically significant yet small relation with work satisfaction in correlation and regression analyses. The presented results are also the rationale for promoting mastery approach goals in the workplace to improve work satisfaction as they are statistically significant positive predictors of it.