The Degree of Self-Determination and Job Satisfaction of White-Collar Workers in Japanese Firms

In most Japanese major companies, white-collar workers are engaged in lifetime employment system and seniority-based pay system. Since noncontingent money payments do not decrease intrinsic motivation, those companies provide a favorable and unique opportunity to observe and test intrinsic motivation. The present study tests a version of E. L. Deci’s (1975) hypothesis that, if a person’s feeling of self-determination is enhanced, his or her job satisfaction will increase. With a measure of self-determination which was first developed, the hypothesis was is supported by data from 10,916 white-collar workers in 385 organizational units of 46 Japanese major companies: There is a strong linear relationship between the job satisfaction and the degree of self-determination.

The fundamental proposition of Deci's cognitive evaluation theory stated that if a person's feeling of competent and self-determination were enhanced, his or her intrinsic motivation would increase, and vice-versa (Deci, 1975, Proposition II).
De Charms (1968) stated that a person's primary motivational propensity is to be effective in producing changes in his or her environment.
Similarly, Deci (1975) asserted that people engaged in many behaviors in order to feel competent and self-determining; the concept of competence referred to one's ability or capability to deal effectively with his or her surroundings (White, 1959).Thus competence has a same meaning as self-determination if it is traced back to its origin, and then Deci's above proposition is restated as Takahashi 2 follows.

Hypothesis.
If a person's feeling of self-determination is enhanced, his or her job satisfaction will increase, and vice-versa.
The idea that self-determination enhances job satisfaction has a long history in psychology under various names, for example, autonomy, job enrichment, participation, and so forth.It was certainly not discovered by Deci but goes back at least to Argyris (1957) and Herzberg et al. (1959).
Many studies, including those based on Hackman and Oldham (1980), have confirmed that job satisfaction is related to autonomy.
It is nice to have a cross-cultural replication, though this may have been done by others also.
Moreover, Japanese major companies can provide a favorable opportunity to observe intrinsic motivation.It is difficult to test Deci's hypothesis in a company without expectation of permanent employment because an employee might come to feel that the only significant reward is salary and positions.Deci (1971Deci ( , 1972) ) hypothesized that rewards contingent on a high level of task performance should have a negative effect on intrinsic motivation.Most Japanese major companies have pinned their success on so-called three "sacred treasures": the lifetime employment system, the seniority-based pay system, and company unionism.There is still a tendency to follow the seniority tradition that the white-collar worker's salary increases as the number of years of service increases in the lifetime employment system.Deci's (1975) finding stated that noncontingent money payments did not decrease intrinsic motivation.Therefore Japanese major companies can provide a favorable and unique opportunity to observe and test intrinsic motivation.Takahashi (1993Takahashi ( , 2001) ) developed a measure of "propensity to change" in order to explain the lukewarm feeling in Japanese firms, and found that the propensity to change and intrinsic motivation were significant for organizational activation in Japanese firms (Takahashi, 1992).
To test our hypothesis, we conducted 11 surveys of white-collar workers in Japanese firms all of which have never modified the lifetime Developing a Measure of

Self-Determination
In 1990, before the first survey, we made a preliminary survey of head offices at two Japanese manufacturing companies in order to select questions from among our preceding surveys' 100 that the others will be as equally so?" 1=yes, 0=no.
The questionnaire was written in Japanese.
These questions are intended not to have direct relationship with job satisfaction, that is, they are related only to the feelings of self-determination.
For these questions, "yes" means a high degree of self-determination, and "no" means a low degree of self-determination.Only the first eigenvalue exceeded unity and the rest fell short of it.The corresponding vector of the first principal component was (0.464, 0.479, 0.476, 0.379, 0.430).Although the weight of D 4 was slightly small, we could conclude that the degree of self-determination was calculated as the equally weighted sum of D 1 to D 5 .
Therefore the degree of self-determination (DSD) is defined and calculated as the sum of the "yes" replies to all five questions: DSD of a person is an integer from 0 to 5. (1), railways and road passenger transportation (4), banking (8), life insurance (1), retail trade (1), hotels (1), consultant (1), real estate development

Follow-Up Surveys
(2), security (1), service (2).14 companies were investigated twice or more but their organizational units were different in each survey.
When perceptions are measured on the same questionnaire using basically the same item format, the correlation between variables obtained is potentially inflated because of a large number of potential third variables that may influence the relationship.In order to avoid this response-response problem, in each survey, we used the questionnaire having 60 or more questions, and most of them except for Q1 to Q5 and Q6, which will be stated later, were replaced by new questions every year.
The research was carried out from August to September of every year.We obtained 10,916 respondents' data from the questionnaires (total response rate was 89.3%).78.4% were men, 20.2% were managers, average age was 36.4 years, and most had college degrees.

Results
In the 11 surveys, job satisfaction was measured by means of the following question on job attitude: Q6. "Are you satisfied with your job?" 1=yes, 0=no.
48.5% of the total respondents answered "yes," and 51.5% answered "no."The ratio of "yes" to total respondents of question Q6 is called the job satisfaction ratio.
We calculate the degree of self-determination and job satisfaction ratio, and then obtain Table 1.
As been stated, in Japanese firms, there is the lifetime employment system and the seniority-based pay system where wages are not tied to behavior.
From the standpoint of intrinsic motivation, we are afraid that in this situation self-determination would be very high and held relatively constant at a high The scale used seems a very strange one.Q1 and Q4 seem focused on the issue of vision, Q2 on delegation, Q3 on participation, and Q5 on group cohesion.They are clearly not homogeneous.But these five items can be loaded on one factor, that is, self-determination because Figure 1 shows a strong linear relationship.
employment system even in the present economic difficulties in Japan.The first survey in 1990 was made to develop a measure of degree of self-determination (DSD), and then we made the follow-up surveys in 1991 to 2000 by using the same measures of self-determination and job satisfaction as the first survey.Through these 11 surveys, we obtained 10,916 white-collar workers' data from 385 organizational units of 46 Japanese major companies.
By using the same questions Q1 to Q5, we made 11 follow-up surveys in 1991 to 2000.In total of 1990 to 2000, we selected 385 organizational units of 46 Japanese major companies who were JPC'

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Graph of the Job SatisfactionRatio Versus the Degree of Self-Determination

Table 1 .
Pooled Results of 11 Surveys in 1990 to 2000 Q6. "Are you satisfied with Degree of self-determination (DSD)