MOSCOW, August 31. /TASS/. For Russians, inspiring jobs are more important than large salaries, according to research conducted by University of Tyumen sociologists.
"We see more similarities to the incentive pattern of Soviet-era data than to the results from five-year ago, especially given the mounting conflict in values between market conditions and non-market incentives," Gulnara Romashkina, the head of the university’s department of mathematic methods, information technologies and management systems in the economy, was quoted as saying by the university’s press service.
"On the one hand, it is becoming rarer for people to change jobs due to low salaries. On the other hand, salaries remain the main reason for dissatisfaction with working conditions," Romashkina said.
According to polls conducted in the Tyumen Region in 2017, 37% of employees are satisfied with their current job and have no plans to change it, while only nine percent of those sampled expressed discontent with their job and voiced plans to find a new one.
"Satisfaction with working conditions is linked to an individual’s social status, even if he does not realize it. Moreover, satisfaction with the obvious characteristics (salary, career, prestige) of one’s job may contradict its intrinsic aspects (content, conditions and pressures)," she added.
According to the press service, the intrinsic features were the key reasons for keeping one’s job. Among them are an interesting job (22%), habits (21%), nowhere to go (16%). Whereas the lack of interest (33%), staff cuts (23%) and low wages (19%) were cited as the main reasons to quit one’s job.
"We see growing satisfaction with jobs and working conditions. The level of satisfaction with working conditions has almost no connection to the age and sex of those surveyed. State officials were the ones most satisfied with their jobs, while agricultural workers were the least," the university said.
The university also noted a few connections between the satisfaction with someone’s job and their level of education, which is not typical of foreign studies but "reflects the situation in the Russian labor market.’
According to the university’s sociologists, during crises, because of external pressure material needs trump everything, but as the economic situation improves, society returns to its pre-crisis condition and the importance of interesting jobs bounces back.