JOB SATISFACTION

Job Satisfaction

Job Satisfaction

Introduction

Job satisfaction refers to the overall feelings one has and the evaluation one makes about one's job. People with high job satisfaction experience a pleasurable or positive emotional state when they think about their job or job experiences. In simple terms, they like their jobs. (Hulin, 2009)

Job Satisfaction in relation to psychology

Since early studies in the 1930s, job satisfaction has become one of the most widely investigated concepts in the field of industrial/organizational psychology. It is a valuable outcome in its own right but also a driver of other important individual and organizational outcomes. The importance of this concept is reflected in its central role in numerous theories, such as those concerning job design, leadership, and employee withdrawal. (Locke, 2009)

Measurement of Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction may be measured for a variety of reasons. For example, a company may measure job satisfaction over time to assess trends in employee attitudes or reactions to a new policy or organizational intervention. Assessing job satisfaction might also serve a diagnostic purpose, identifying those aspects of the job with which employees are dissatisfied. As a last example, companies might measure job satisfaction to predict other important attitudes or behaviors (e.g., job turnover). In all instances, a useful measure is important. (Fried, 2007)

Relationship of Personal Characteristics and Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction also depends on people's temperaments and personalities. For example, some individuals will be dissatisfied with their jobs no matter what the nature of their work. This idea was introduced in the 1930s when an early study suggested job dissatisfaction might be the product of nonadjustive emotional tendencies, but the idea then lay dormant until recently.

In the past few decades, two broad approaches to the investigation of dispositional sources of job satisfaction have emerged. The first, an indirect approach, shows that job satisfaction scores can be quite stable over long periods of time (e.g., 5 years), even when individuals change employers and occupations. The implication is that stable individual differences in personality cause the long-term consistency in job satisfaction. However, the problem with this approach is that other factors might cause this stability. For example, some people might consistently choose good jobs, and some people might always choose bad jobs, resulting in stable levels of job satisfaction over time. (Judge, 2010)

A second and more direct approach is to relate dispositional variables to job satisfaction, thereby providing insight into what personality traits might be important. One ...