CHAPTER 10

What Is Job Satisfaction Anyway?

Ben was staring blankly at his monitor at the end of another long day. He noticed how many post-it notes had accumulated around his monitor—phone numbers of contacts, reminders, to-do lists, and some random messages to himself that made no sense to him now. Ben started to take them down, when one caught his eye. It was the reminder about his emotional quotient (EQ), and it brought him straight back to his year-end review (YER). It read, “1) Focus and listen more, 2) Think before responding, 3) Withhold immediate emotional judgement.” Ben had promised his employees that he would improve in these areas over the next few months after his YER, and those months had now passed.

Had Ben improved in these areas and ultimately enhanced his EQ? His exchanges with Mary resulting in a breach of psychological contract may suggest that his listening skills and his thought processes before responding could be improved still. Mary was an example of an employee who ultimately had low job satisfaction, which could at least partially be attributed to deficiencies in emotional engagement from her superior. Ben wondered if he had other employees who weren’t fully satisfied with their jobs.

Ben mulled over the issues around his EQ and felt he had learned from his exchanges with Thomas and Mary and was implementing the goals set out on his reminder note. Thinking about his YER with Mary also got him thinking about YERs in general. Of course, as Ben was a traditionalist, he knew the importance of YERs and their impact on overall job satisfaction and motivation, major factors in terms of an employee’s career prospects. Then Ben thought to himself, what is job satisfaction anyway? We all have our ideas about the key features that define job satisfaction, and there are plenty of theories and research out there to highlight those features, but Ben was at a loss to come up with anything off the top of his head. One obvious avenue for clarification on what job satisfaction is could come from upper management itself. Senior leadership should routinely measure employee job satisfaction to ascertain the effect of any company operations and changes that might adversely affect employees.

Ben e-mailed his boss, Lisa, to see if the company had any archived employee job satisfaction questionnaires that had been used in any previous large-scale employee surveys. She responded quickly to say that there were none.

During the conversation with Lisa, he volunteered to do research into job satisfaction and come up with a questionnaire to measure it in future company surveys of employee morale. At first Ben thought that he could delegate this extracurricular activity, or at least part of it, to Jana. However, he knew she was stretched as it was without adding another task to the mounting tasks she already had, so he reconsidered. He would have to do this research on his own time.

Back in his college days, history was one of Ben’s favourite subjects. So his initial research into job satisfaction allowed him to go back to the 1920s and work forward from there. This made his task more enjoyable. In the 1920s, job dissatisfaction (Mayo 1988) was the focus when employees were surveyed about their work. Negative emotions, including anger, fear, and suspicion, were assessed. The frequency and intensity of these negative emotions were a driving force in the rise of labor unions. Later in the 1930s it was acknowledged that job satisfaction can be affected by job-related factors and employee individual differences (Hoppock 1977). This discovery led to further research of why some occupations had happier workers as compared to others. Along with the occupation itself being a job-related factor, employer concern for workers was also identified as an individual difference factor that influenced employee job satisfaction (Hoppock 1977). Studies revealed that when more attention is paid to employees, and they see this attention as positive, attitudes toward supervision improve, which can lead to increased productivity. This impact has been referred to as the Hawthorne effect (Landsberger 1958).

In the 1950s, a “two-factor” theory (Herzberg, Mausner, and Snyderman 1959) emerged that recognized the influence of intrinsic job-related motivation versus extrinsic job factors. According to the theory, job satisfaction is linked to reductions in absenteeism and turnover intentions, among other positive outcomes. Interesting work challenges the employee, thus satisfying his or her intrinsic motivational needs, while good pay and work conditions would satisfy extrinsic “hygiene” needs (Maslow 1970). Ben knew that Mary’s hygiene needs had not been met, and that negatively impacted her motivation.

Critiques of the “two-factor” theory that followed resulted in a move in the 1970s toward recognition of the concepts of valence, instrumentality, expectancy, and equity as determinants of job satisfaction (Lawler 1994). Ben processed these technical terms and came up with a more straightforward explanation. Job satisfaction is achieved if the employee gets from the job what he or she believes is deserved. Again, Ben knew Mary had not gotten what she thought she deserved—the promotion promised to her.

The valence, or value, aspect of job satisfaction (Locke 1976) seemed pivotal to Ben in the definition of an employee’s job satisfaction. For example, if the employee valued pay, then a pay raise would have a major positive influence on his or her job satisfaction, but pay is not always necessarily the most important thing to an employee. If an employee does not value the opportunity a promotion provides, then that opportunity, if it comes along, would not strongly influence his or her job satisfaction. Ben felt that in future YERs, he could tease out what each member of his team valued in terms of the job and try to establish goal commitments (Locke 1976) based on those valued aspects to ensure continued satisfaction. Ben vowed that he would not make the same mistake he made with Mary. Any promises made on his part in terms of these goal commitments would be delivered on.

Ben asked himself the question “What are these valued job aspects?” This brought him out of his historical journey through the development of theories related to job satisfaction to a search for what makes a job valuable to an employee in a virtual setting. Investigations into quality of work life (QWL) stood out as an area of research that could provide him with the answers he needed.

So far Ben had focused on the attitudinal aspects of job satisfaction, where it is assumed that motivation derived from positive job satisfaction leads to improved job performance (Spector 1997). However, job satisfaction can also be an important aspect of an employee’s psychological well-being (Arnold, Randall, and Patterson 2016). Ben realized that job satisfaction is linked directly to occupational health and QWL. Ben’s company had made some big changes over recent years to address occupational health issues, resulting in the current Employee Assistance Program. Be that as it may, the company had not surveyed its employees in terms of job satisfaction, which was Ben’s task at hand. Through research, Ben found that surveys relating to job satisfaction could vary widely: a single question on how satisfied the employee was; multiple statements relating to job satisfaction where set responses, strongly agree to strongly disagree, were provided for the employee to choose from; or a facet approach where various aspects/facets relating to job satisfaction are measured by sets of statements relating to each aspect. If he were to recommend a QWL survey incorporating job satisfaction and related aspects, the facet approach seemed most relevant.

Ben’s searches for QWL and occupational health employee surveys led him to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website (The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health n.d.). In 2002, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), in agreement with the National Science Foundation, had been able to add QWL questions to the General Social Survey (GSS) of U.S. households, with a slightly modified version of the survey administered again in 2006 and 2010 (The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health n.d.). Ben was impressed with the thoroughness of the coverage of QWL within the survey. The 41-item survey covered many job-level issues, including workload, participation, resource adequacy, supervisory behavior, promotions, job variety, teamwork, role clarity, and stress management. Cultural issues, including safety climate, harassment and management relations, and physical and mental health outcomes, were covered.

Most importantly to Ben, job satisfaction was also included among the other outcomes measured on the GSS, which also included performance, job commitment, and intentions to leave, with hours of work also addressed. Ben felt confident that he had found a suitable questionnaire to address job satisfaction and employee morale. Ben sent the link for the questionnaire to Lisa. Ben stuck two post-it notes to his computer monitor: one to remind himself to follow-up with Lisa and the other to prompt him to modify his approach to the next set of YERs by finding out what his employees value in their jobs and using that information to gain goal commitments.