The purpose of this paper is to understand how personal, job, and organizational characteristics influence the job satisfaction of community child care center workers. Community child care centers providing low-income class children with care, teaching and sound cultural activity services have become the largest child welfare institution in Korea since the child welfare act, amended in April 2004. The workers who works at these far-reaching community child care centers provide children with services in their daily life relationships. As the clients' satisfaction is dependent on the quality of services offered by the workers, it is in the interest of community child care center management to enhance the satisfaction level of the workers in turn.
For this study, 423 workers at 199 community child care centers in Gwangju were interviewed (145 directors, 154 workers, and 124 child welfare teachers).
Collected data from the survey were analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-test, ANOVA, correlation analysis and multiple regression procedures.
The findings of the study are as follows. The mean job satisfaction of the workers at community child care centers in Gwangju was at the middle.
Personal variables linked to job satisfaction are age, the employment contract type of the child welfare teachers, and the number of children that the center workers are responsible for. The relationship between job and organizational characteristics with job satisfaction shows that the two characteristics are statistically significant with a positive correlation. The specific factors influencing the job satisfaction of the community child care center workers are challenge spirit, participation value and compensation fairness of directors, participation fairness, organizational reputation, job security, and challenge spirit of workers, compensation fairness, relationship with supervisors, and challenge spirit of child welfare teachers. Specifically, the compensation fairness largely influences on the job satisfaction level.
Based on the findings, the government should acknowledge the fact that low wages is the key factor to job dissatisfaction and subsequently increase the monetary support for institutional measures and personnel expenses.