Sekaran (1989) conducted a study to investigate the paths to job satisfaction of bank employees via job

involvement and sense of competence. The other variables considered in this study were job

characteristics (skill variety, autonomy, task identity and feedback); communication, participation in

decision making, stress and work ethics. A sample of 267 employees, drawn from 12 banks from the

mid-western parts of the United States and statistical technique such as mean, standard deviation,

correlation and regression were used to analyse the data collected from the employees. The study revealed

that the sense of competence and job satisfaction were significantly correlated with all the variables

considered in the study and similarly, job involvement was also significantly correlated with all the

variables except feedback from the job. Job autonomy and participation in decision making were

significantly correlated to all the other variables. The results of the regression analyses tracing the paths

from all the independent variables to job involvement and to sense of competence and all ten variables to

job satisfaction showed that work ethic and skill variety were the only two variables that significantly

explained the variance in job involvement. In case of sense of competence, apart from job involvement,

work ethic, skill variety and task identity and stress and communication had significant path coefficients.

With respect to job satisfaction, as theorized, it was sense of competence and not job involvement,

which had a direct relation to job satisfaction. In other words, the findings of the study revealed that

the independents variables influence the job involvement of people at work, which in turn influence

the sense of competence that they experienced and the sense of competence directly influence

employees’ job satisfaction.