Job Satisfaction

From Assessment to Intervention

Paul E. Spector

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000539349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Organizational Behavior

Distilling the vast literature on this most frequently studied variable in organizational behavior, Paul E. Spector provides students and professionals with a pithy overview of the research and application of job satisfaction.

In addition to discussing the nature of and techniques for assessing job satisfaction, this text summarizes the findings regarding how people feel toward work, including cultural and gender differences in job satisfaction, personal and organizational antecedents, potential consequences, and interventions to improve job satisfaction. Students, researchers, and practitioners will particularly appreciate the extensive list of references and the Job Satisfaction Survey included in the Appendix. This book includes the latest research and new topics including the business case for job satisfaction, customer service, disabled workers, leadership, mental health, organizational climate, virtual work, and work-family issues. Further, paulspector.com features an ongoing series of blog articles, links to assessments mentioned in the book, and other resources on job satisfaction to coincide with this text.

This book is ideal for professionals, researchers, and undergraduate and graduate students in industrial and organizational psychology and organizational behavior, as well as in specialized courses on job attitudes or job satisfaction.

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1 THE NATURE OF JOB SATISFACTION

DOI: 10.4324/9781003250616-1

Every year the U.S. Federal government surveys its employees to find out among other things how employees feel about their jobs. Since 2004, the U.S. Congress has required as part of the National Defense Authorization Act that employees be assessed on both the leadership practices that affect agency performance and on their job satisfaction (U.S. Office of Personnel Management, 2008). This includes satisfaction with leadership, the work environment, rewards, and personal growth. Clearly the U.S. Congress recognizes the central importance of employee job satisfaction for the effective operation of its agencies.

Job satisfaction is a topic of wide interest, not only to the U.S. Federal government but to both people who work in organizations (employees and leaders) and people who study them. In fact, it is the most frequently studied variable in academic research on people at work. It is a central variable in both research and theory of organizational phenomena ranging from job design to supervision. Literally thousands of job satisfaction studies can be found in the journals of industrial-organizational psychology, organizational behavior, and many other fields such as counseling, criminology, education, and nursing, just to name a few.

What Is Job Satisfaction?

Job satisfaction is simply how people feel about their jobs and different aspects of their jobs. It is the extent to which people like (satisfaction) or dislike (dissatisfaction) their jobs. As it is generally assessed, job satisfaction is an attitude. That means it reflects people’s evaluations of the job along a continuum from favorable to unfavorable. As Weiss (2002) explains, often job satisfaction is described as an emotional reaction to the job, but satisfaction is better considered as more of a cognitive reaction—a weighing of whether a job is good or bad from a personal perspective. As we will see later in the book, job satisfaction is related to emotional responses to work, but it is not the same thing.

In the past, job satisfaction was approached by some researchers from the perspective of need fulfillment, that is, whether or not the job meets the employee’s physical and psychological needs for the things provided by work such as pay or making social connections with others (e.g., Wolf, 1970). However, this approach has been abandoned as today most researchers focus attention on job satisfaction as an attitude.

Job satisfaction can be considered as a global evaluation of the job or as a related constellation of attitudes about various aspects or facets of the job. The global approach is used when the overall or bottom-line attitude is of interest, for example, if one wishes to determine the effects of people liking or disliking their jobs. Most of the research I will discuss assessed global job satisfaction in relation to other variables of interest. The facet approach is used to find out how satisfied people are with different aspects of the job, such as coworkers or pay. This can be very useful for organizations that wish to identify areas of dissatisfaction that they can improve. Sometimes both approaches can be used to get a complete picture of employee job satisfaction.

A job satisfaction facet can be concerned with any aspect or part of a job. Facets frequently assessed include rewards such as pay or fringe benefits, other people such as coworkers or supervisors, the nature of the work itself, and the organization. Table 1.1 contains facets that can be found in some of the most popular job satisfaction instruments, which will be discussed in the next chapter of this book. Sometimes organizations will be interested in very specific facets not found in an existing scale, such as satisfaction with policies or practices unique to that organization.

Table 1.1 Common Job Satisfaction Facets

Facet	Description
Appreciation	People value what you do.
Communication	How well management communicates.
Coworkers	Peers you work with.
Fringe benefits	Insurance, vacation time, and other benefits.
Job conditions	The environment in which you work.
Nature of the work itself	The tasks that you do.
Organization itself	Overall feelings about the employer.
Organization's policies	How the organization operates.
Pay	Salary and other financial rewards.
Personal growth	Learning new knowledge and skill.
Promotion opportunities	Ability to move into a higher position.
Recognition	Getting praise for good work.
Security	Little chance of being laid off.
Supervision	The person you report to.

The facet approach can provide a more complete picture of a person’s job satisfaction than the global approach. An employee can have very different feelings about the various facets. He or she might like coworkers and dislike pay, a common pattern for North Americans. As we will see in Chapter 3, however, patterns can be different in other countries or regions of the world.

Not only do people differ in their satisfaction across facets, but the facets are only modestly related to one another. Table 1.2 contains intercorrelations among the nine facets of the Job Satisfaction Survey or JSS (Spector, 1985), which is one of the satisfaction instruments discussed in Chapter 2. As can be seen, the correlations among many of the facets tend to be rather small, for example, the correlation between satisfaction with pay and supervision is 0.19. This pattern of results is convincing evidence that people have distinctly different attitudes about the various facets of the job. They tend not to have an overall feeling that produces the same level of satisfaction with every job facet.

Table 1.2 Intercorrelations among JSS Subscales

Facet	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
1. Pay
2. Promotion	0.53
3. Supervision	0.19	0.25
4. Benefits	0.45	0.36	0.10
5. Contingent rewards	0.54	0.58	0.46	0.38
6. Operating procedures	0.31	0.31	0.17	0.29	0.46
7. Coworkers	0.19	0.23	0.42	0.16	0.39	0.22
8. Nature of work	0.25	0.32	0.31	0.20	0.47	0.30	0.32
9. Communication	0.40	0.45	0.39	0.30	0.59	0.44	0.42	0.43

From Spector (1985).

Note: n = 3,027. All correlations are significant at p < 0.001.

There has been a lot of work conducted to determine the underlying structure of job satisfaction facets, that is, what are the major aspects that people distinguish when they think about their jobs. Most studies have used complex statistics (e.g., factor analysis) to reduce people’s responses to many satisfaction items to a small number of underlying dimensions of job satisfaction. These studies, summarized by Locke (1976), have suggested several structures. They clearly separate facets into four areas:

• Nature of Work: The tasks done on the job.
• Organizational Context: Policies and practices.
• Rewards: Benefits and pay.
• Social Environment: Coworkers and supervisors.

The intercorrelations among the facets in Table 1.2 are consistent with this structure in that a facet correlates more strongly with other facets in its own area than facets in other areas. For example, the reward facets of fringe benefits and pay correlate more strongly with one another than with the organizational context facets of communication or operating procedures.

The Business Case for Job Satisfaction

There are important reasons that we should be concerned with job satisfaction, which can be classified according to the focus on the employee or organization. First, the humanitarian perspective is that people deserve to be treated fairly and with respect. Because work is such an important part of people’s lives, what happens at work can have a huge impact on both physical and mental well-being. Job satisfaction is to some extent a reflection of good treatment by the employer. It can be considered an overall indicator of work adjustment. Having employees with low job satisfaction suggests problems in how employees are being managed and treated. A broad stakeholder perspective says that organizations have a responsibility to all people who are affected by them including employees. Making efforts to enhance job satisfaction is the right thing to do from an ethical and moral perspective.

Second, the utilitarian perspective is that job satisfaction can lead to behavior by employees that affects organizational functioning. This is the perspective than many would consider the “business case”, that is, how does emp...