Literature on the significance of value of job autonomy on workplace wellbeing
The value of job autonomy in job wellbeing among the self-employed can be defined in two
approaches.
The first one is to examine the relationship between job autonomy and job wellbeing across
different contexts, different nations and culture. The contribution of job autonomy to higher
job wellbeing has been consistently found in 23 OECD countries (Benz and Frey, 2003), in
the United States (Kawaguchi and Daiji, 2002), Canada (Finnie and LaPorte, 2003), Belgium,
China and Peru (Chen et al.,2015) . Among the different occupations, for example, the
significance of job autonomy in workplace wellbeing has been verified among nurses (Faraz,
2017), teachers (Chebet, 2016), retail employees (Ji, Park, and Kim, 2015), higher education
employees (Nadler, Voyles, Cocke, and Lowery, 2016) and the self-employed (Sevä,
Larsson, Strandh, 2016).
Besides testifying the importance of job autonomy across different contexts, the second approach
is to examine whether another factor constrains its contribution to workplace wellbeing, for
example the poverty. In other words, is job autonomy related to workplace wellbeing even when
people received low paid income and/or is the effect of job autonomy dependent upon satisfaction
of their income? This approach is normally called as moderating test. Currently, in the
psychological field, there is a particular interest in testing the interplay between SDT theory and
the Maslow’s hierarchy. In Maslow’s theory, autonomy and two other basic psychological needs
can be constrained by material needs, which some refer to it as security needs (López-Rodríguez
and Hidalgo, 2014). However, a handful of studies pay particular attention to other needs that
constrain the effect of basic psychological needs in SDT but fail to verify. Tay and Diener (2011)
recently examined the interplay between satisfactions of psychological needs and needed for
safety and did not find systematic evidence for an interaction between security needs and
psychological need satisfaction in the prediction of
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wellbeing. Filak and Pritchard (2008) also researched the interaction of job autonomy and material
Needs in the prediction of job motivation among internship students and found that money did not
matter while students enjoyed their jobs during the internship. Chen et al.’s (2015) research also
suggested that the associations between psychological need satisfaction and wellbeing cannot be
moderated by finance factors, like job income. In the entrepreneurship field, the moderating approach
has been widely used to test the significance of an independent variable on a dependent variable, for
example, Lange (2012) tested the moderating role of personality between job autonomy and job
satisfaction. Jamal (1997) tested whether marriage status constrained the job stress’s effect on the
self-employed’ mental health. Jamal and Badawi (1995) used age as a moderator to test the effect of
Job stress on the quality of working life of self-employed immigrants. Thus, this study will also take
this approach to test the moderating role of poverty to verify the significance of job autonomy on
workplace wellbeing and further our understanding of the interplay between SDT theory and
Maslow’s hierarchy.
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