system dynamics and artificial neural network integration: a tool to valuate the level of job satisfaction in services

job satisfaction (js) plays important role as a competitive advantage in organizations especially in helth industry. recruitment and retention of human resources are persistent problems associated with this field. most of the researchs have focused on the job satisfaction factors and few of researches have noticed about its effects on productivity. however, little researchs have focused on the factors and effects of job satisfaction simultanosly by system dynamics approaches.in this paper, firstly, analyses the literature relating to system dynamics and job satisfaction in services specially at a hospital clinic and reports the related factors of employee job satisfaction and its effects on productivity. the conflicts and similarities of the researches are discussed and argued. then a novel procedure for job satisfaction evaluation using (artificial neural networks)anns and system dynamics is presented. the proposed procedure is implemented for a large hospital in iran. the most influencial factors on job satisfaction are chosen by using ann and three differents dynamics scenarios are built based on ann's result. . the modelling effort has focused on evaluating the job satisfaction level in terms of key factors which obtain from ann result such as pay, work and co-workers at all three scenarios. the study concludes with the analysis of the obtained results. the results show that this model is significantly usfule for job satisfaction evaluation keywords: job satisfaction, system dynamics, artificial neural network (ann), healthcar field.