Division of labor and coordination, intra‐organizational career and salary fairness: Study in Estonian university libraries

Abstract

Purpose

The aim of the current article is to clarify satisfaction of the staff of Estonian university libraries with the division of labor, work organization and coordination, existence of intra‐organizational career opportunities as well as with the fairness of salaries in view of the qualifications and responsibilities of university librarians in Estonia.

Design/methodology/approach

The data used in this paper are based on reviewing and summarizing of relevant literature to provide an overview of the concepts of performance and efficiency in general and in the context of the library as well as on results of the original study, created by the paper's authors, held in 2011/2012 in Estonian university libraries to determine the attitude of the libraries' staff towards division of labor and performance appraisal.

Findings

Although a number of Estonian university librarians were mostly satisfied with the division of labor within their departments, the respondents feel that duties in the library as a whole should be reorganized and workloads should be divided more equally. Librarians are relatively pessimistic about career opportunities within their libraries. The fact is that in Estonia, the predominantly women's jobs, such as teachers, librarians and nurses, are low‐paid. Therefore, as expected, the employees of university libraries are not satisfied with their salaries. However, librarians are capable and willing to work more and/or more intensively than they are currently allowed if that would bring about an increase in their salaries.

Originality/value

The majority of the literature in library science has focused – and rightfully so – on the user: what do users and patrons want and/or need, how do they use it, how can librarians best provide it to them, do the users feel themselves comfortable in library building etc., etc. Also, a fairly large number of studies have focused on finding relations between librarians' job satisfaction and performance output, but, to the best of the authors' knowledge, no research has been previously carried out in the Estonian library context to determine employees' attitudes towards their division of labor and coordination as well as librarians' intra‐organizational career opportunities and fairness of the salary.

Citation

Kont, K. and Jantson, S. (2013), "Division of labor and coordination, intra‐organizational career and salary fairness: Study in Estonian university libraries", Library Management, Vol. 34 No. 6/7, pp. 415-432. https://doi.org/10.1108/LM-10-2012-0069