The Link between Relational Models, Lifestyle and Life Satisfaction

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to have a better understanding of the relationships between relational models, life style and life satisfaction of professionals in the Turkish business context. The relational models theory, which was proposed by A. Fiske, covers four major ways of forming social relationships; communal sharing, market pricing, authority ranking, and equality matching. The concept of life style has been also a hot topic that requires more explanation both in people's work lives and social lives. Life satisfaction implies the feeling of happiness that is known as subjective wellbeing (SWL) in academic world. The survey covers 403 respondents who are all working mainly in large-scale organizations and three different Likert type questionnaires were used to collect data both through personal administration and Internet based applications. Reliability and factor analysis all of which resulted in highly satisfactory results and different sets of data analyses methods and techniques were performed. Research findings clearly indicated that communal sharing is the most preferred relational model followed by equality matching by Turkish employees. The most interesting finding of the study is the fact that healthy life-style is the most important one despite to the respondents' desire to have luxurious life style. Furthermore, higher their social class will be resulted in more life satisfaction than the others. It would be emphasized that the association between leisure time activities and SWL has a critical importance regarding their satisfaction of life.