한국생산성학회

The purpose of this study is to examine how the mismatch between person and job affects intrinsic job satisfaction and to investigate the mediating effects of the employees’ dis-satisfaction about pay level in the relationship between person-job mismatch and job satisfaction. To this end, this study investigated the relationship between job satisfaction and person-job mismatch which was divided into 4 divisions including over-education, under-education, over-skilled and under-skilled. Also it analyzed the mediating effects of the discrepancy between the expected amount of pay and the real amount of pay. The 19th (2016) and 20th (2017) data of the Korea Labor & Income Panel Survey (KLIPS) were used. The findings are as follows. First, regardless of whether the employee can receive the expected amount of pay, the over-education and the over-skilled showed negative effects on job satisfaction. On the other hand, there were positive relationship between under-education/under-skilled and job satisfaction. Second, the discrepancy in wage level plays a mediating role in the relationship between person-job mismatch and job satisfaction. Therefore, it is suggested that not only the mismatch between individuals and jobs should be considered in improving job satisfaction of employees, but also it is necessary for firms to consider re-assignment of job and job rotation based on job analysis and to monitor employees’ evaluation on whether they fit their jobs. There are some limitations in this paper. The first limitation is that the use of single-item measurement regarding education mismatch and skill mismatch may cause problems of reliability in measurement. Second, longitudinal analysis based panel data will be better than cross-sectional analysis in this paper. Third limitation is that some independent variables like firm size, industry, job characteristics, and so on were not controlled in the process of analysis. This paper implies that future study is needed to examine whether subjective perceptions held by employees regarding over/under education and over/under skilled are real or false perceptions and why about 10% of the samples think themselves who earn bigger wages than expected.