Reward management and job satisfaction in call centers for telecommunication companies in Uganda: A case study of Airtel Uganda

Abstract

Rewards play an important role in organization’s growth and better performance and have become a fundamental component of employment relationship and human resource management policies. The need for recognizing and rewarding contributions, skills, knowledge, competencies and efforts that individuals bring at work has become a global concern. The study examined the impact of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards on job satisfaction, among call centre employees in Telecommunication companies in Uganda. The relationship between job satisfaction and factors leading to job dissatisfaction were investigated. The data was collected from call center employees at Airtel Uganda. Standardized questionnaire was used to collect data. Results showed positive trends in all variables. Extrinsic rewards are comparatively more important than intrinsic rewards when job satisfaction of call center employee was evaluated. The study found that there are many factors affecting job satisfaction among call center employees among which includes; communication within the organization, relationship with coworkers, benefit package which are equitable , salary increase and supervision in the organization , recognition through promotion , fair payment for the work , reward given to employee and sense of pride in doing their job. Correlation research design was employed and data was analyzed using SPPS (Pearson r, Correlation Coeffiency) .Finding indicated that; r = .96*. a 95% confidence interval suggested a very strong significant relationship between reward practices and Job Satisfaction. A correlation coefficient r = .21 depicted a weak positive correlation between Reward practices and call center performance.

Further Study should be conducted on the nature of call center job and it’s impact on job satisfaction. A widely-held belief in the telecom industry is that employees have developed bad attitude due to labor shortage or job dissatisfaction. Employees are believed to job-hop for no good reason at that even when the rewards and the working conditions seem to be the same amongst the industry players. Unfortunately, despite employee turnover being such a serious problem in this industry there seems a dearth of studies investigating it; especially studies using a comprehensive set of causal variables are rare and needs deep investigation.