Job Satisfaction in Public Administration: The Role of Social Utility

Some phenomena such as the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting are emerging as alarming factors in Italy, even within the Public Administration (Formez 2023). Taking care of organizational wellbeing and, consequently, of the persons who work in those organizations, is one of the possible strategies to try to contain, as well as understand, such phenomena. Within a Regional Directorate of the Italian Revenue Agency, an analysis on organizational wellbeing, conducted on a sample of 336 persons (response rate 45.8%), highlighted that job satisfaction - a construct enduring linked to organizational wellbeing (Warr 1999) - is strongly connected to social utility, to the extent that it is the factor that most explains the level of job satisfaction (mixed model ß=5.98, p-value<.001). The survey included a questionnaire with validated scales from MOHQ (Avallone and Paplomatas 2005), from the ECPT Scale (Tous-Pallarés et al. 2011, Italian validation by Magnano et al. 2020), one item measuring Job Satisfaction (D’Amato and Majer 2005) and one item on future utility towards data (Majer et al. 2002). The result is consistent with international studies on Public Service Motivation (PSM, Perry 1996;1997; Naff and Crum 1999; Vandenabeele 2007; Bright 2008; Taylor and Westover 2011; Giaque et al. 2012; Quratulain and Khan 2015; Hollόsy-Vadász 2018) expanding the reflection also in the Italian public administration context.