Quality of Work Life and Job Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Organizational Commitment and Moderating Role of Organizational Culture in the UAE Public Sector

Public organizations across the United Arab Emirates continue to report modest levels of employee job satisfaction despite sustained policy investment in workforce welfare, which motivates continued investigation of its underlying drivers. Drawing on social exchange theory and the two-factor theory of motivation, this study examines the direct effect of quality of work life on employees' job satisfaction, the mediating role of organizational commitment, and the moderating role of organizational culture. Data were collected from 412 employees across three departments of a UAE public sector ministry in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Sharjah, and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling with bootstrapping of 5,000 subsamples. The measurement model demonstrated acceptable convergent validity, though discriminant validity between quality of work life and job satisfaction was not clearly established, a concern subsequently traced to specific overlapping item content between the two scales. Quality of work life had a significant positive effect on job satisfaction, and organizational culture significantly and positively moderated this relationship. Contrary to the hypothesized direction, organizational commitment showed a significant negative direct effect on job satisfaction, alongside an indirect effect whose sign could not be arithmetically reconciled with its own component paths; both patterns are interpreted, cautiously, as reflecting statistical suppression and a substantive conflation of affective and continuance forms of commitment, pending disaggregated re-estimation with data this study did not have access to. Additional robustness analyses report the measurement properties needed to disaggregate commitment, formally verify the mediation arithmetic, and propose three alternative model specifications, alongside an explicit account of the common method bias tests this secondary analysis could not perform. The structural model explained 43.3 percent of the variance in job satisfaction and 63.2 percent in organizational commitment. These findings extend social exchange theory to a moderated mediation model in a Gulf public sector context, qualify the assumption that commitment uniformly enhances satisfaction, and set out a concrete verification agenda before either finding is treated as settled.

quality of work life; job satisfaction; organizational commitment; organizational culture; public sector

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