Christian Business Review 2022: Pressing On Toward God's Goal

MOTIVATIONS IN FAITH-BASED ORGANIZATIONS
CBR PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
tion and indirect effect through the mediation of motivation.
Contrary to our hypotheses, personal faith was not related
to either motivation (β = .00, p = .999) or job satisfaction.
At a cursory glance, this finding is difficult to understand and
counterintuitive; however, it becomes more understandable
when we consider the positive relationship between perceived
fit and job satisfaction. Among employees with higher
perceived fit levels, a higher personal faith level may lead to
greater perceived meaningfulness of their work and identification
with the organization, which in turn will lead to higher
levels of motivation and job satisfaction. By contrast, employees
with lower perceived fit levels are more likely to disagree
with the organization’s faith, perceive less freedom to
discuss their own faith at work, lack meaningfulness in work,
and not identify with the organization. All these factors could
diminish job satisfaction. It is possible that among employees
with low perceived fit levels, the higher their personal
faith the lower the job satisfaction, because employees high
in personal faith are then more likely to disagree with the
organizational faith. Consequently, in a group of employees,
high levels of job satisfaction from those with high personal
faith and perceived fit may be balanced out by low levels of
job satisfaction from those with high personal faith but low
perceived fit.
We ran a forward stepwise regression (with two models)
to test this speculation. In the first model, personal faith and
perceived fit were the independent variables and job satisfaction
the dependent variable. In the second model, we
added the interaction between personal faith and perceived
fit as one more independent variable. We standardized all
the independent variables in the models to reduce potential
multi-collinearity between the interaction term and their
FIGURE 3
PERSONAL FAITH × PERCEIVED FIT INTERACTION EFFECT ON JOB
SATISFACTION
7.5
JOB SATISFACTION
7
6.5
6
5.5
LOW FIT
HIGH FIT
5
LOW FAITH
HIGH FAITH
CHRISTIAN BUSINESS REVIEW Fall 2022 352