SOCIAL QUALITY AND QUALITY OF WORK LIFE OUTLINE THE EMPLOYEES ’ QUALITY OF LIFE IN INDIAN PUBLIC SECTOR : AN INVESTIGATION

Many researchers have tried to identify the factors that determine quality of life and impact on these factors on social quality. The current research outlines the existing theory and provides an argument which suggests that the trust, loyalty and challenging works also can be part of the construct of social quality. Authors propose a model, supported by data, which suggests ways in which current social theories of trust, loyalty and challenging work may be incorporated within the quality of life framework. Design/Methodology/Approach - The study has two fold objectives. Firstly, to analyze the factors influencing employees social quality and quality of work life in Indian public sector and secondly, to understand the impact of identified variables on quality of life. The study is based on the primary data, collected from the employees of public sector of India. Data analysis was done using SPSS software. The statistical analysis method employed was descriptive analysis, factor analysis and multiple regressions.


INTRODUCTION
Social Quality, a revolutionary concept having the potential to influence the lives at professional and personal spheres, has captured the attention of managers and workers similarly.The social quality approach argues that it comes on mainstream of the behavioral sciences and has turned its empirical interest to individual perspectives on 'Quality of Life'.This approach is trying to conceptualize the quality of life from a scientific perspective.The improvement of quality at the workplace is a concept that has captured the imagination of managers and workers in a similar way.A number of researchers and theorists have tried to identify the kinds of factors that determine quality of life in the work place.It is always proven that a high quality of life is essential for organizations to attract and retain their employees.Akdere (2006) stated that the issue of work life quality has become vital in the last two decades due to increasing stress of day to day business environment and family structure.Lau, and May (1998) suggested that companies offering better work life quality and supportive work environments would likely gain leverage in hiring and retaining valuable people and companies with high quality of life enjoy excellent growth and profitability.Mirvis and Lawler (1984), supported the need for objective criterion to measure work life quality.In recent development, governments around the World have been keen to explore inter-connected issues related to improving the health and wellbeing of their citizen and communities.Some of these issues include maintaining and developing social order, human rights, equity and human capabilities (SEN, 1999;2003).
The social quality approach argues that it comes on mainstream of the behavioral sciences and has turned its empirical interest to individual perspectives on 'Quality of Life'.This approach is trying to conceptualize the quality of life from a scientific perspective.construction of social quality.Authors propose a model which suggests ways in which current social theories of trust may be incorporated within the social quality theory.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Social quality refers to an ideal standard for life which can be acceptable and affordable to the people.It may be defined as the standard of living where people are able to accept, follow and contribute in social, cultural and economic activity for the development and well-being of oneself and their society under the given circumstances (BECK, et al., 2001).
Since social life reflects in representation and identification of self and groups, people must participate as actors and representative of the class they belong.The individuals have their own status but in groups, they represent a collective way to identify and follow the norms.There are four factors which determine environment of social quality.They are Social empowerment, social inclusion, socio-economic security, and social cohesion.It is understood that these factors can be measured in the social symbols and indicators which presents the social index of quality of life (MAESEN;WALKER;KEIGER, 2005;MAESEN;WAKER, 2005).

The origins of Social Quality
The rise of Social Quality started by the initiative launched by a group of social scientist in 1997 under the Dutch Presidency of the European Union.The objective behind this initiative was to develop a conceptual framwork on which a line of strategy can be drawn and activities can be exercised to shape the social life.(BECK, et al., 2001).
The concept of Social Quality drew the attention of social thinkers, philosphers, and researchers upto that extent where the term 'Social Quality' got a special meaning and value in the literature related to society and in other cases.The indicators of quality life were being identified through which the social quality can be measured and quantified.
With this background the rise of social dimensions and empirical research on quality of life, set new goals of societal development and value orientation.At the same time, an awareness and approach developed to structure a social system to address the challenges in meeting 'quality of life'.

Quality of Life
The Quality of Life is a well acknowledged topic of social theory which appreciate and plead for individual well-being, discuss about objective indicators on the one hand (such as income, condition of accommodation, employment etc.) and subjective indicators on the other hand.This shows concerns how individuals are satisfied about these most important aspects of their lives.These indicators for Quality of Life are meant for adding a new dimension to the concept of well-being, which may be used for measuring social development and growth.The Quality of Life of a country cannot necessarily be understood in terms of GDP or income or consumption, but when looking at the human progress that reflects in eco-cultural environment of societies and bring it on a subjective, as well as an objective indicator and dimension .
The initiative of the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions reflects that the normal approach to asking for Quality of Life is to identify the key domains of life (housing, employment, health, family relations, social development, etc.) and to identify several indicators under each of these domains (RAPLEY, 2003;FAHEY, et al., 2004).
According to Bohnke (2005), the key indicator for Quality of Life is basically satisfaction about these dimensions.This can be defined as satisfaction with any one of the dimensions or with life in general.It is concerned with the individual's standard of living (living conditions) and his or her perceptions of such circumstances (satisfaction and happiness).
It has been observed that attractive as a policy tool both subjective as well as objective indicators have been well established in social life (NOLL, 2004;NOLL, 2002).It is understood as a means of observing social change and measuring wellbeing in the society (FAHEY, et al., 2004).Lane (1996) has stated quality of life as a process which includes subjective and objective essentials.He emphasized the active role of personal experience and

Quality of Life and Social Quality
The dimensions explored with the Quality of Life approach, rose the issue of reorganizing the concept of Social Quality.The approach for Quality of Life has proved that, after a certain level of monetary growth, overall satisfaction does not enhance the perception of wellbeing and happiness (ECKERSLEY, 2000;ECKERSLEY, 1998;CUMMINS, 1995;CUMMINS, 1998).
However, people are less open about the acceptability for Quality within their society.After a limit of economic threshold, people become conscious about distribution of income, unpaid housework issues, the wastage of natural resources and the unemployment cost (ECKERSLEY, 2000;HALSTEAD, 1998;HAMILTON, 1998).
Individual's own quality of life is most influenced by personal and intimate aspects of life, which protects against several negative changes in personal conditions.This may appear as a loss of confidence for society and its future, which results in terms of loss of individual trust.(ECKERSLEY, 2000).At the same time a big concern is about the negative effects of economic changes on family and social life (PUSEY, 1998).It may result as the collapse of traditional ethics and values in society.It also harms existing family relations and working networks.
The social quality approach underlines both social and the individual aspects.
It measures the quality of everyday social life, which is different from the quality of life approach that gets the viewpoint of an individual as independent entity.It is based on 'the social theory'-a sociological approach, which is opposite to the quality of life approach.The social quality approach also actively focuses on the individual, who living in developing social situations.The social theory is the result of the dialectical relationship between the collective identities development and human being self-realization.This includes four conditional factors -socioeconomic security, social cohesion, social inclusion and social empowerment.These essential four factors represent the way by which, Individual become competent in the field of social quality.The perquisites of this process are the rule of law, human rights and social justice, social recognition or respect, social responsiveness and the individual's capacity and determination to participate.( VAN DER MAESEN, et al., 2002).
The approach reproduces the human being as social, not only as individual subjects.It also provides a vision for the future of social quality about how the social quality of a society can and should be improved.It provides the fundamental association between need, action and policies.The social quality approach merges together both economic and social development.It also measures the degree of quality of routine life for an acceptable living standard, the structural attribute of societies and their associates, as judged by reference to their impact on society.
Basically, it includes both the combination of structural as well as individual-level factors.
The scope of quality of life is vast, extensive, comprising with potentially continuous inventory of realms and indicators and covering the entire world, whereas social quality is initially viewed and defined strongly around its four core components.
Furthermore, in difference to quality of life, social quality has an explicitly political or ideological dimension that being associated to a vision of participative social relations.However, the quality of life entails value judgments as neutral.According to Havlovic (1991), Scobel (1975), andStraw andHeckscher (1984), the key parameters observed in quality of work life include job security, better reward systems, higher pay, opportunity for growth, challenging work and participative groups among others.Walton (1974) proposed the conceptual aspects of work life quality where employees perception towards their work organizations could determine their quality of work life.These are adequate and fair compensation, safe and healthy environment, development of human capacities, growth and security, social integrative constitutionalism, the total life space, and social importance.

Quality of Work Life
An extensive Literature review of these disciplines recommended that trust is an important component for the smooth functioning of society and for the progress, development, maintenance and sustainability of the social quality of people's lives (MEYER et al., 2008;MEYER;WARD, 2008;WARD, 2006;WARD;COATES, 2006).social cohesion, a social quality conditional factor deals with identity, value, and ethics.It is considered by 1) trust in others 2) near by transparency and corruption 3) believe in social rules and institutions 4) humanity and multiculturalism diversity 5) value and belongingness.Ilast few decades it has been observed that general trust and loyalty among people has decreased.Distrust against major institutions has increased, corruptions has improved .This impact working life also.
It is a fact that the importance of trust arises as an important contributor for relationship building and given support to the strength of different relationships for social as well as professional exchange (GRÖNROOS, 2000;HÅKANSSON;SNEHOTA, 1995;MORGAN;HUNT, 1994).Hence, trust is the corner stone in relationship marketing and social exchange theory (MORGAN; HUNT, 1994) It is extensively accepted that it is an important factor to build a strong business relationships (YOUNG; WILKINSON, 1989).Giddens (1990;1991;1998)  Luhmann specified that "one should expect trust to be progressively in demand as a facilitator to handle the complications of the future which technology will cause" (LUHMANN, 1979).: 10.14807/ijmp.v7i3.433This suits within the framework of the 'risk society' (BECK, 1992), hence, the growing perception of risk transports 'trust' in even more significant factor.Therefore, more the risk, more would be the need for trust (LUHMANN, 2005).Consequently, trust assumes role of crucial academic prominence to social scientists who are principally concerned in both understanding the vital factors of social life and also social change.Beck (1992;2005) and Giddens, both the researchers, highlighted the significance of trust for an individual and its impact on quality of life.Henceforth, the matter of trust / mistrust is not only about the construction of risks, but that individual and groups working in an organization have established higher levels of reflexivity.
Trust is widely accepted as a key managerial concept.Therefore, trust is identified as an essential key for problem resolution (ANDERSON;NARUS, 1984;SCHURR;OZANE, 1985), and play as an important tool of the creativity and challenge involved in solving problems (WOOLTHUIS et al., 2002).
Apart from these, trust is able to convert individual differences into functional conflicts and resulted in productivity benefits (MORGAN; HUNT, 1994).Loyalty has been discussed by many social researchers.Richard Oliver (1999) summits, that loyalty can be visualized as a strong sense of commitment which plays an important role to build impression for individual's professional life and relationship building.
Based on the literature review certain questions may occur which can outline the relationship between social quality and quality of life.
Based on the literature review the following hypothesized model of social quality is shown in Figure 1.
The above mention questions are the indicative of the quality of life led by the employees of the organizations chosen as our sample.Besides this, these questions also indicate the social quality quotient directly or indirectly.
Of course, we need to address that these indicators are neither purely objective indicators nor the subjective indicators.To use the survey data to reflect the condition of social quality, one should be aware of the impact on quality of life.
The third part includes the questions of identified variables related to quality of work life.In this regard, we put questions related to Safety measures, Health facilities, Welfare facilities, Job security, Pay package, Grievance Handling, Lighting facilities and Supervisory support .These questions are able to reveal the impact of quality of work life.
With these questions, we can thus, understand the impact of quality of work life in the public sector.
Data analysis was done using SPSS software.The statistical analysis method employed is Descriptive analysis; factor analysis and multiple regression analysis.
The scale used for collecting data was 'Five Point Likert Scale' ranging from 5 for 'strongly agree' down to 1 for 'strongly disagree.

DATA ANALYSIS
Among the surveyed groups, the basic features of the respondents are below: 47.8 percent respondents were from 25-30 years of age group, 76.1 percent respondents were male staff, 23.9 percent were female staff, and 44.6 percent respondents had worked in the organization for more than 5 yrs (see Table 1).

Factor analysis for Quality of Work life:
According to the above mentioned methodological notes, we develop further for data analysis.Factor analysis has been used to find out the factors influencing employee's social quality and quality of work life.The Strength of relationship among variables is strong.It presents good idea to proceed for factor analysis of the data.
Factor analysis with principal component by varimax rotation, that was performed to find out the factor structure, revealed one factor.Thus, the one factors explained 47.834 percent of the total variance.All factors' factor loadings and variance values can be seen in Table 2 and Table 3.Thus, factor analysis is most frequently used to identify small number of

Factor analysis to know the variables of Social Quality:
Factor analysis was performed to identify the key factors of social quality.Rotated Component Matrix has been generated using varimax with Kaiser normalization procedure.All nine variables along with the three extracted factors are given below in Table 5.

Three factors found are as: 1) Trust, 2) Loyalty 3) Challenging Work
Three factors have been extracted as a result of factor analysis and they represent social quality in one and another ways.Accordingly, we can further assess

Multiple Linear Regression Analysis
Among these three factors identified in factor analysis, Trust is to be considered more powerful since it projects maximum variance.In order to test the impact of these variables on quality of life, multiple linear regression analysis has been employed.All three variables are considered as independent variable and the social quality is assumed as dependent variable, which are presented in Table 7.
Table 6 reveals the value of adjusted R square is .492,which indicates that 49% of variation on quality of work life is explained by three underlying variables of social quality.It can be seen from Table 7 that all three independent variables are positively related with the quality of life.
[http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/]Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License 875 INDEPENDENT JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT & PRODUCTION (IJM&P) http://www.ijmp.jor.brv. 7, n. 3, July -September 2016 ISSN: 2236-269X DOI: 10.14807/ijmp.v7i3.433 the capacity of individuals -in his terms the 'quality of persons' -as a constitutive element of quality of life: According to him "Quality of life is well defined by the relation between two subjective elements and a set of objective circumstances.The subjective elements of a high quality of life includes: (1) a sense of well-being and (2) personal development & learning growth.The objective element is visualized as quality of circumstances which represents prospects for optimum utilization by the individual leading a life".
[http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/]Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License876INDEPENDENT JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT & PRODUCTION (IJM&P)http://www.ijmp.jor.brv. 7, n. 3, July -September 2016  ISSN: 2236-269X  DOI: 10.14807/ijmp.v7i3.433 It has been supported by the researches that quality of work life enhances the feelings of employees towards their jobs, colleagues, and companies which leads to organization's growth and profitability.Quality of work life is one of the most prominent researched area .Researchers have attempted to measure work life quality in a variety of combinations of their questionnaires such as, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job stress, organizational identification, job involvement etc. Finally work role ambiguity, conflict, and overload were also studied as alternative measures of quality of work life.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Hypothesized Model of Social Quality factors that may be used to represent the relationship among the set of inter-related variables.In the current research, high correlation exists between Safety Measures (SM), Health Facilities (HF), Welfare Facilities (WF), Job Security (JS), Pay Package (PP), Transparency of Grievance Handling (TGH), Lighting Facilities (LF), and Supervisory Support (SS).Thus, we can combine these variables to form a single factor as the values are greater than 0.5, namely Quality of work Life.All these deducted factors directly or indirectly are having strong influence on quality of work life.

Factor
analysis with principal component by varimax rotation, that was performed to find out the factor structure, revealed three factors.The three factors explained 63.411 percent of the total variance.Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of sampling result was .796(>.75) and significance level was p= .00(<.05), Bartlett's Test of Sphericity[http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/]Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/]Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License 884 INDEPENDENT JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT & PRODUCTION (IJM&P) http://www.ijmp.jor.brv. 7, n. 3, July -September 2016 ISSN: 2236-269X DOI: 10.14807/ijmp.v7i3.433 the studies of social trust in relation to social quality.Hence the selection of these three factors is fully justified.The cumulative impact of these three factors has directly impact on Social Quality refer to Figure 2.

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Model of Social Quality (with beta values)

Table 1 :
An overview of respondent's demographic profile

Table 2 :
Factor matrix -quality of work life

Table 3 :
Total variance explained -Quality of Work life

883 INDEPENDENT JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT & PRODUCTION (IJM&P)
value was found 451.739 (df= 36).Hence, the result was acceptable.All factors' factor loadings and variance values can be seen in Table4.

Table 4 :
Total variance explained-Social Quality

Table 5 :
Rotated component matrix-Social Quality Principal Component Analysis.Rotation Method: Varimax with Kaiser Normalization.a. Rotation converged in 5 iterations.

Table 6 :
Model summary -Regression analysis


Trust having highest beta coefficient of 0.495 and t value of 9.32 is statistically significant at .01 level.