Human Resource Management Practices And Job Satisfaction Of Academics In Malaysian Higher Education Institutions

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of human resource management practices on job satisfaction among academics in a Malaysian higher education institution.

Design/methodology/approach – A pilot study was carried out on a sample of 144 academics in a higher education institution. The respondents included a wide range of university faculties, departments and academic units in the participating university. A 30-item scale developed by Halid et al. (2020) and Hauret et al. (2020) were designed to measure human resource management practices and a 3-item scale developed by Noor (2013) was used to measure job satisfaction. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 25.0 were used to analyze the data and provided descriptive, correlation and regression analyses.

Findings – Human resource management practices of recruitment, selection, training and development, performance appraisal, reward, recognition and promotion opportunities were significantly and positively related to job satisfaction. The results and statistical analysis of the current study could be a reference to indicate the effects of human resource management practices on job satisfaction among academics in Malaysian Higher Education Institutions.

Research limitations/implications – This study focused on academics in a selected Malaysian Public Higher Education Institution. Thus, it is not possible to generalize the findings to academics in other public or private higher education institutions. This study also found difficulty to find the similar significant literature on human resource management practices and its relationship with job satisfaction within the Malaysian Higher Education sector. The other limitation in this study is the number of human resource management practices selected to be investigated and limited measurements to be considered in this study.

Originality/value – This study made a significant contribution of human resource management practices and the current state of job satisfaction in Malaysian higher education particularly in the public sector. In light of the findings, it is worth considering that at the organizational level, there are a number of actions that can be adopted by the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia and the university management to increase and maintain the job satisfaction among academic staff in regards to its antecedents of human resource management practices. The study is also expected to provide useful reference for future researchers in this research area.