Do Bureaucratic Organizations Produce more Satisfied Employees?
William Finlay University of Georgia Jack K Martin University of Georgia Paul M. Roman University of Georgia Terry C. Blum Georgia Institute of Technology Popular and social scientific critiques of the bureaucratic model of organizational behavior argue that employment in highly structured, bureaucratic work organizations adversely affects worker attitudes and behavior. In particular, these critics suggest that bureaucratic structure is associated with lower employee job satisfaction. Several empirical studies, however, have yielded an unexpected positive relationship between bureaucratic structure and satisfaction. In this research, the authors argue that this paradoxical pattern is the result of these studies having used measures of organizational structure that conflate job and organizational characteristics. The authors show that among members of an emerging profession, highly structured organizational activities have a negative effect on employee satisfaction when job characterist
