Abstract
This essay analyzes the links between workers’ fairness concerns and job satisfaction in different ownership and organizational forms of the Italian social service sector. Social cooperatives emerge as the organizational form that best sustains the perception of procedural fairness. On the other hand, the public sector shows the most serious weaknesses. A clear difference emerges between the public and the private sector in general, with the former at a disadvantage. Given the very significant role of procedural fairness in influencing job satisfaction, social cooperatives turn out as an innovative and successful organizational form, at least as far as labour relations are concerned, the difficulties in retaining their more educated and skilled workforce notwithstanding.
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- 1.
Data are taken from the FIVOL-FEO survey. The 2001 ISTAT Italian Census on Industry and Services recorded 1,401,481 workers employed in the health care and social service sector at the national level. Since a census of social services alone did not exist in Italy at the time the research was performed (1998), one was carried out directly on the basis of administrative sources in the ex-ante selected 15 provinces (out of a total of 107), which were representative of the different social and economic conditions of the country. Two different services were selected for each province and organizations were drawn at random from the census. The sampling procedure seems sound, since the social service sector alone can be estimated to employ about 500,000 workers nationally. Also the distribution of ownership forms in the FIVOL–FEO sample fairly well reflected the national distribution, even though for-profits were over-represented in order to allow meaningful comparisons.
- 2.
The relational items have been moved from one component to the other and considered part of non-material satisfaction even though the analysis grouped them in the material component. This ad hoc modification was suggested by the results of the econometric analysis which followed the CatPCA. The component coefficients are displayed in Table 6.4.
- 3.
The public sector obtains relatively high scores for some items in the material component, like professional growth and job security.
- 4.
The five mutually excluding options are “stay as long as possible”, “stay at least for some years”, “look for a job in the same sector”, “look for a job in a different sector”, “leave as soon as possible”.
- 5.
The tension in the meaning of the proxy for effort is highlighted in the econometric analysis where it is clear that effort measured as excess work-hours has contrasting effects in different organizational forms.
- 6.
Religious nonprofits show the lowest percentage among all the five organizational forms in terms of workers that accomplished a university degree or a secondary school diploma (Borzaga and Tortia 2006).
- 7.
The total of traditional nonprofits is the sum of religious and non-religious nonprofits. The explicit analysis of religious nonprofits and for-profit firms was excluded since the low number of cases (235 in the case of religious nonprofits and 180 in the case of for-profit firms) does not yield clear results beyond the influence of fairness concerns, which is common with all the other organizational forms.
- 8.
Indeed, it is likely to have a relevant impact on worker well-being in all sectors of the economy.
- 9.
When they are willing to quit when a new job opportunity comes, the desire to stay in the same sector means that there are elements of dissatisfaction with the specific organization in which they work. If instead they want to change sector of activity, dissatisfaction with some aspects of the job presumably concerns the sector as a whole.
- 10.
Unluckily, the measurement of turnover cannot be ascertained as control variable in this database.
- 11.
A second limitation of the analysis is that regional rates of unemployment are lacking, and they may have had an impact on loyalty since they represent a negative index of the availability of outside options.
- 12.
- 13.
See Borzaga and Tortia (2006).
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Acknowledgements
I thank Carlo Borzaga for his precious comments. Of course, the standard disclaimer applies.
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Tortia, E. (2009). Perceived Fairness and Worker Well-Being in Public, For-Profit and NonProfit Firms: Evidence from the Italian Social Service Sector. In: Musella, M., Destefanis, S. (eds) Paid and Unpaid Labour in the Social Economy. AIEL Series in Labour Economics. Physica, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-2137-6_7
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