How the Workplace Plays a Role in a Good Life: Using the Job Demands-Resources Model in Predicting Correctional Staff Life Satisfaction

Life satisfaction is a positive overall feeling towards one's life and is an important factor for employees and their employers. There has been little research on life satisfaction of staff working at correctional institutions who play an important security role in the care, custody, and control of offenders. The current study explored how work environment variables are related to correctional staff life satisfaction using the Job Demands-Job Resources Model, which holds that job demands and job resources are two major categories of work environment variables. Job demands cause strain for employees, creating negative outcomes and reducing positive outcomes while job resources result in staff being productive and feeling good, increasing positive outcomes and lowering negative outcomes. The current study focused on the specific job demands of perceiving the job as dangerous, role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload, and the job resources of instrumental communication, job autonomy, job variety, and quality of training. The data was collected from 160 completed questionnaires from all available full-time staff (N = 200) at a prison in the midwestern part of the United States. Using multivariate regression analysis, it was found that role ambiguity and role overload had negative effects on life satisfaction, and job variety and quality training had positive effects. While the effects of job demand and job resource variables differed depending on the aspect of the work environment being examined, the results overall supported the Job Demands-Job Resources Model in explaining life satisfaction.