We also know money matters for workplace satisfaction. Our research shows higher pay is statistically linked to higher job satisfaction, but the impact is small. To most workers, pay matters much less than other factors like culture and values, career opportunities, and the quality of senior leadership.
In this analysis, we ask a different question: Do the job factors you care about most change as your income changes? As pay rises, do our workplace priorities around compensation, work-life balance and career opportunities shift as well?
With Higher Pay, Do Workplace Priorities Shift?
To study this question, we started with a sample of more than 615,000 Glassdoor users who contributed both a salary report and a company review since 2014.(2) We then sorted them into four groups based on income.
Within each income group, we ran a linear regression to see which of the following six workplace factors had a statistical impact on overall employee satisfaction:
Career Opportunities
Compensation & Benefits
Culture & Values
Senior Leadership
Work-life Balance
Business Outlook
We then examined which of these six workplace factors were the most “important” predictors of overall employee satisfaction for each income group.
This was done using a method known as “Shapley value” analysis. It shows which workplace factors have the most explanatory value in terms of the relative contribution of each to the R-squared of each income group’s regression.(
