Assessing the Degree of Job Satisfaction for Short-Term Contract Employment at TANESCO Ubungo, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

: The focus of the article was to assess the degree of short-term contract employees’ satisfaction in TANESCO, at Ubungo, Dar es Salaam. Specifically, the article examined the challenges of renewal short-term employment contract on employees’ satisfaction. A cross-sectional research design with both quantitative and qualitative approaches was employed. Data were collected by using questionnaire to 80 employees of TANESCO, and in-depth interview to 10 managers of TANESCO. Analysis for quantitative information was firstly done descriptively by involving frequencies and percentages, then a bivariate analysis with chi-square (X 2 ) to find out whether there is statistically significant between variables. For qualitative data, content analysis was applied. The results show that there were challenges facing employees in a renewal of short-term employment contract. The challenges include; a renewal needs more efforts in re-negotiation, fear of not given again the contract, and an employee can be terminated at any time. In bivariate analysis, the study found that the corrected value in chi-square (X 2 ) for gender is 1.001 with significance level (p-value) of 0.011 which indicate that female employees are more likely (X 2 starts from 1) to be challenged in renewal of a short-term contract. The corrected value for marital status is 1.613 with statistically significant p-value of 0.044 which indicates that married employees were more likely to be challenged in renewal of the short-term contract. The study concludes that employees at TANESCO who were faced with challenges during renewal of short-term contract.


Introduction
Globally, the contract which is provided to the employee is always mutually beneficial in the employment relationship between employer and employee, (Hornung et al, 2019).Employees always seek to improve their employment contracts with the major aim of satisfying their personal needs (Lawler and Finegold, 2010).In this case, employees make negotiation with their employers for obligations such as good payments, promotions, and work conditions (Rousseau, 2016).
According to Donaldson and Dunfee (2012), employees prefer a fairness and trust contracts which meet their personal desires and still contribute to attainment organization's goals.(Diedericks, 2018).This means, the degree of contract between employer and employee may affect the employees' experiences.When employee experiences the differences of what he perceives between the ideal and actual set of obligations, he becomes dissatisfied, and that dissatisfaction can result to negative outcome on his intention to stay.In vice versa, if the employee experiences a degree of contract with fairness and trust, he will also experience satisfaction and well-being in working (Edwards and Karau, 2017).

Suggested Citation
In African countries, most of the government organizations provide for contracts to satisfy their employees, however, in most of these countries the issue of contract came due to International Money Fund (IMF) requirements (Ofosuhene and Sammo, 2020).For example, in Ghana, some of the government organizations have switched to employing workers on contract basis, especially when the country was under IMF program.Most of the employees are given six months to one-year contract which are sometimes renewed at the end of the period.Additionally, these contracts make employees not to enjoy most of the benefits offered to the permanent employees.(Landsbergis et al., 2014).
In case of Tanzania, an employee is explained as a person who has entered into a contract of employment or has entered into any other contract under the individual undertake to work personally for the other contract (Employment Labour Relation Act, 2004).Scholars such as Mjema, (2014);and Kiagi, (2015) have shown that in recent years Tanzania has been faced with employees' trikes from different sectors like education, healthy, transportation.All these happened in public institutions and their main claim was job dissatisfaction in terms of salary and working conditions in both ideal and actual contract (Edwin, 2011).Moreover, the government has been making efforts to rescue the situation in its public institutions, these efforts have been applied by formulating various Acts such as Employment and Labour Relations Act and labour institutions Act of 2004.
In Tanzania Electric Supply Company (TANESCO), employees are defined in four groups; namely, permanent contract employees, employees with temporary contract, in which employees of temporary contract are of two categories which include employee with contact of one to three years, and employees with contract of three to six months but the contract is renewable in regard to the employee's performance (John, 2014).
Despite the effort done by the government, employees are still complaining about the degree of contract which can either be a short-term or permanent.Also some employees are dissatisfied with the short-term contract because this kind of contract does not offer opportunities for pension, healthy services and other essential services.Graaf (2015) argued that temporary or short-term employment contract causes the lowest employees' satisfaction.Although TANESCO is described to bring about categories of employment contract, including temporary and permanent employment contract (John, 2014), a little is known about how the degree of contract at TANESCO associate's employees' satisfaction.In that case, there is a need to prepare this article to assess the degree of short-term contract employees' satisfaction at TANESCO.Specifically, determined the challenges of renewal-term (short-term) contract on employees' satisfaction.

Description of the Study Area
This study was done at Ubungo Municipality Dar es Salaam, specifically at the Tanzania Electric Supply Company (TANESCO).Ubungo Municipality has been selected because it is the area in which the service station of TANESCO is found.In this case, it was easy to reach employees with different types of contracts which enhanced the achievement of needed information for analysis.

Research Design and Sampling Procedure
The study employed simple random sampling to get employees of TANESCO.The simple random sampling was done in reflection to the probability sampling strategy whereas all individuals in a studied population had a zero chance of being included to form a sample.The main reason of using simple random sampling strategy was to give each individual member of the population an equal chance of being involved in providing information for the study.
In addition, non-probability sampling in particular purposive sampling technique was used to select the key informants (managers of TANESCO) to involve in the study.In fact, the key informants were selected purposively based on their accessibility, availability and willingness to participate in the study.

Data Collection
Questionnaire was involved to collect information from 80 employees of TANESCO.The questionnaire consisted of only closedended questions for gathering quantitative information.The reason to involve only the closed-ended questions in a questionnaire is to limit respondents to specific answers in order to obtain information on the magnitude of issues understudy in quantitative manner.Additionally, questionnaires were self-administered to 80 employees who were given a specific time to fill and returning them to the research assistant.Good enough, all respondents i.e. 80 (100.0%)managed to fill properly and timely returned the provided questions.
The study employed a face-to-face interview for gathering of more information from the participants at TANESCO in Ubungo, in Dar es Salaam.Specifically, interview, in particular semi-structured interview was done to managers of TANESCO at Ubungo.Furthermore, it is very important to note that the whole time for accomplishing a single interview was 45-60 minutes.

Data Analysis
The responses to the closed-ended questions in the questionnaire were assigned, coded, and labeled through quantitative approach with the help of Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23.Additionally, frequency and percentages were used to generate descriptive information.Additionally, inferential analysis employed a bivariate analysis with a chi-square (X 2 ) to develop the association factor between renewable (short-term) employment contract (independent variables) and employees' satisfaction (dependent variables).Moreover, the corrected value in the chi-square which starts from zero (0) was termed as less influence, while that starts with one (1) was termed as more influence.However the p-value was also involved for statistically significant between variables, the p-value of ≤0.05 was termed as statistically significant, while that of greater that 0.05 was termed as insignificant.
For qualitative data, analysis was done through content analysis.According to Abroms et al., (2011) content analysis is a research tool used to determine the presence of certain words, themes, or concepts within some given qualitative data.Using content analysis, researchers can quantify and analyse the presence, meanings and relationships of such certain words, themes or concepts.In this analysis technique, collected data were coded and the categories of codes were created.Thereafter, different themes from the code were developed and used in analysis.The data from primary sources such as field notes, audio tapes notes, and transcripts were coded and analyzed manually.

Socio Demographic Characteristics of Respondents
This part shows socio-demographics of all respondents participated in this study.Moreover, responses are given in terms of; age, gender/sex, marital status, highest level of education, and department in which an employee was working.The results are illustrated in Table 1.

Challenges of Renewable (short-term) Contract in Employees' Satisfaction
In this part, the study presents findings based on the challenges of renewable (short-term) contract in employees' satisfaction.The Likert scale was used to collect different opinions from 80 employees who gave their responses under this stuff.The employed Likert scale was designed to include five options: strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree.The findings are described through the following terms.

Needs More Efforts in Re-Negotiation
Results in Table 2 show that in a total of 80 employees of TANESCO who participated in providing information, more than half 42(52.5%)strongly agreed that short-term (renewable) contract needs more efforts in renegotiation, followed by 23(28.7%)agreed, 7(8.7%) strongly disagreed, 5(6.3%) neither agreed nor disagreed, and 3(3.8%) disagreed.Additionally, through conversation with the key informants who were the managers of TANESCO Ubungo, the participants commented that it is correct that employees used more efforts to re-negotiate for the short-term employment contract when it comes to end.This is because, if an employee was bargaining about his/her basic rights during the life of his/her employment contract, it leads to a problem of not provided with another contract when the first one gets expired.In this case, even if an employee will have a good idea of aiming to state about his needs, the employer never listens, instead he may find of not providing again an employment contract to the employee.

Fear of Not Given Again the Contract
The results also indicate that among 80 participants of this study, 35(43.7%)strongly agreed that the short-term (renewable) contract leads to fear of not given again the contract, 23(28.7%)agreed, 13(16.3%)neither agreed nor disagreed, 5(6.3%) strongly disagreed, and 4(5.0%) disagreed (Table 2).Moreover, in the interview session it was explained a short-term employment contract makes employees to get fear of insecurity because when the contract is expire they could not be provided with it again.As one of the interviewees pointed out that: "Possibly, employees fear of insecurity, as they see a short-term employment contract as a kind of contract in which an employee can be fired or not provided with another contract at any time" (Participant 10).

An Employee Can be Terminated at Any Time
At a total of 80 respondents of this paper during data collection, 33(41.2%)strongly agreed that in a short-term contract an employee can be terminated at any time, 18(22.5%)neither agree nor disagreed (neutral), 14(17.5%)agreed, 11(13.8%)strongly disagreed, and 4(5.0%) disagreed.Moreover, in the interview, the interviewees reported that, generally the laws of Tanzania allow termination of employment.Several reasons are stated to justify termination of employment contract, for example it can be through misconduct, incapacity, incompatibility and operational requirements.However, employees who are provided with short-term contract in the study area are not given the rights to understand reasons for being terminated.Additionally, the signed short-term employment contracts do not highlight well these reasons for termination, therefore it leads to termination based on mangers wish.As one of the interviewees pointed out that: "You know, most of short-term employment contracts do not state well reasons which can cause termination, this leads the managers to terminate a contract without obeying the laws of the country" (Pparticipant 8).The Bivariate analysis results indicate that, the corrected value in chi-square (X 2 ) for gender is 1.001 with significance level (p-value) of 0.011 which indicate that female employees are more likely (X 2 starts from 1) to be challenged with short-term contract for satisfaction.The corrected value for marital status is 1.613 with statistically significant p-value of 0.044 which indicates that married employees were more likely to be challenged with short-term contract for satisfaction.(Table 3).

Discussion
The obtained findings have proven that employees at TANESCO Ubungo used more efforts to re-negotiate for the short-term employment contract when it comes to end.Besides, the findings imply that employees get challenges to obtain a new short-term employment contract when the first one expired, this is because employers who are responsible to provide employment contract always don't need to work on the employees' wants.However, it is also the tendency of employees to need an improvement to their new employment contracts, this leads them to apply more efforts for first to be provided with a contract, second to obtain the improved contract.Similarly, Lawler and Finegold (2010) argue that always employees want the employers to improve their short-term employment contract in reflection to their personal needs.In fact, employees put more efforts to make negotiation with their employers to obtain good payments, promotions, and good working conditions.
Moreover, it has been determined that the shortterm employment contract puts employees into a position of not being provided with the new contract, unless there is more efforts to convince the employer.Similarly, Saliu (2016) found that some librarian employees with short term-term contract are disconnected with remuneration and benefit and others like promotion policy and administration, but it had been impossible to claim for their rights because of fear of not given the new employment contract.
In addition, sometimes employees are found to be satisfied or dissatisfied with the short-term employment contract due to demographic factors such as age, gender, marital status, and education.This is proven in the current study which indicates the demographic factors such as gender and marital status to be statistically significant to employees' satisfaction.This means, it is very possible to find a male unmarried employee to prefer the short-term employment contract because that employee could not have a family to care of.In fact, the obtained findings concur with other findings that satisfaction on employment contract depends much on gender, education and marital status.In addition, employment with tertiary education had been shown to be less likely to be satisfied compared to those employees with no tertiary education (Roux and Rothmann, 2014).

Conclusion
The study concludes; employees at TANESCO Ubungo are not satisfied with organization because the provided short-term employment contract always results to challenges during renewal.This is because, short-term employment contract needs more efforts for renegotiation, sometimes it leads to fear of not given again the contract, it also leads to termination of the contract at any time.The study recommends that TANESCO should invest more efforts to see how it can provide permanent contract, especially for employees who have worked with the organization for more than one year.