Job Satisfaction and Social Media Use: Cognitive Reflection and Journalists’ Utilization in Egypt and the United States

Sample

Studies demonstrate that “social media use” is positively correlated with “employees’ job performance” and positive mediating effect. Using a comparative approach between journalists’ job satisfaction in Egypt and the United States, this article analyzes social media use through different variables including the political system, media freedom, level of journalistic training and professionalism, media regulations, and media ownership patterns. As opposed to the notion of media freedom and professionalism applied in the United States and elsewhere, the tight media environment in Egypt, especially digital media, has pushed journalists to depend more on social media. Building on the literature on social media use in journalistic workflow.

Main Findings

we (1) apply social exchange theory assumptions of relative job satisfaction as a motivator to engage social media in journalism practice, (2) use a questions-as-treatment survey embedded experiment to isolate and prime consideration aspects of one’s job to test for a direct priming effect on reported social media use, and (3) compare social media use across comparative media systems (i.e., Egypt and the United States).

Policy recommendations/implications

The crux of our findings suggests that cognitive reflection by journalists on those aspects of their jobs they derive satisfaction from is statistically linked to motivation to engage social media technologies in their work. In total, these results support the social exchange mechanism: When primed to think about what they like about their work, journalists are more likely to self-report engaging with social media technology— an activity that suggests a motive to innovate or at least embrace a technology about which journalists have shown ambivalence. The practical importance of these results is that focus on the relative satisfaction in one’s work is a springboard to increased use of a core resource for journalistic workflows. As we saw in our interviews with U.S. journalists, relative job happiness levels and engagement with social media technology appeared to have a negative association. However, our experimental data showed a positive relationship. This suggests cognitive focus on aspects of job satisfaction may positively impact other parts of the journalistic workflow (a question for future research to consider). As such, our findings have professional, as well as theoretical, ramifications.

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It is noteworthy that despite the general confirmation of the social exchange mechanism and the effect on self-reported social media use, overall responses to the Ryan (2009) battery show only a moderate sense of “happiness” with journalist work situations. Though there was strong statistical linkage between placement of the Ryan questions and respondents’ reported job satisfaction levels, the “happiness” index was never a statistically significant covariate in any of the regression models. Yet the treatment’s general effect consistency suggests that a deepening embrace of social media in newsrooms can be fostered by improving how journalists feel about their work. This may be promising insight for news managers who want to improve morale, productivity, and efficiency.