Job satisfaction is simply how people feel about their jobs. It sounds obvious, but it’s one of the most studied ideas in organizational behavior, because managers want to know whether happier employees work harder, stay longer and treat customers better.
In this article we’ll look at what job satisfaction actually means, how organizations measure it, what causes it, and what it does (and doesn’t) predict. It sits alongside a closely related attitude, organizational commitment, so it’s worth reading the two together.
What is Job Satisfaction?
The most widely used definition comes from Edwin Locke (1976), who described job satisfaction as a pleasurable or positive emotional state that comes from a person’s appraisal of their job or job experiences.
In other words, it’s an attitude. The employee looks at their job, weighs it up, and ends up feeling somewhere between very positive and very negative about it.
Two things follow from that. First, it’s personal. Two people doing exactly the same job can feel quite differently about it. Second, it has parts. Someone can love the work itself and still be unhappy with their pay or their boss.
A Running Example: Two Nurses on the Same Ward
This is a hypothetical example.
Priya and Tom are both registered nurses on a busy surgical ward. Same roster pattern, same nurse unit manager, same pay scale.
Priya is satisfied. She enjoys the variety of patients, feels she’s good at the job, and gets on well with the rest of the team. Tom is not. He feels the shifts are relentless, he rarely gets feedback, and he’s been passed over for a senior role twice.
So why do two people in the same job feel so differently? And does it matter to the hospital? Those are the two questions the rest of this article tries to answer.
How is Job Satisfaction Measured?
Organizations usually measure job satisfaction with an employee survey. There are two broad approaches.
The first is a single global question, such as “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your job?” on a 1 to 5 scale. It’s quick and easy. You might expect a single question to be too crude, but a review by Wanous, Reichers and Hudy (1997) found that single-item measures of overall satisfaction lined up reasonably well with longer multi-item scales.
The second is a facet approach, which asks about different parts of the job separately and then adds them up. The best-known example is the Job Descriptive Index, developed by Smith, Kendall and Hulin (1969), which covers five facets:
- the work itself
- pay
- promotion opportunities
- supervision
- co-workers
Which one should a manager use? It depends on what you want to do with the results. A single question tells you whether there’s a problem. The facet approach helps you see where it is.
Go back to our ward. A single question might simply show that Tom’s score is low. A facet survey would show that his problem isn’t really the work or his colleagues. It’s promotion and supervision. That’s far more useful if you actually want to fix something.
What Causes Job Satisfaction?
There’s no single cause, but research points to a few main groups of factors.
The Work Itself
The nature of the job tends to matter more than most managers expect. Jobs that offer variety, a sense of doing something meaningful, autonomy and feedback are generally more satisfying. This is the thinking behind Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model.
Priya and Tom actually have the same tasks, but they don’t experience them the same way. Priya gets regular informal feedback from senior colleagues on her shifts. Tom mostly works nights and hardly sees anyone more senior. Same job title, quite different job.
Pay
Pay matters, but probably less than you’d think once people are paid fairly. A meta-analysis by Judge and colleagues (2010) found that the level of pay was only weakly related to job satisfaction. People care a lot about whether pay is fair compared with others, which is a different question from how much they earn.
This is similar to Herzberg’s point that pay is a hygiene factor. Poor or unfair pay causes dissatisfaction, but raising it doesn’t necessarily make people satisfied. See our article on Herzberg’s two-factor theory for more on this.
Supervisors and Co-workers
The relationship with the immediate manager is a big one. A manager who gives recognition, treats people fairly and explains decisions makes a real difference. Supportive co-workers matter too, especially in stressful jobs like nursing, where the team is often what gets people through a hard shift.
The Person
Finally, some of it comes from the employee. Research has found that people’s personalities and general outlook affect how satisfied they are, so some people tend to be more positive about their jobs wherever they work. That doesn’t mean managers can ignore job satisfaction. It does mean a survey score is partly about the person and not only about the workplace.
Does a Satisfied Employee Perform Better?
This is the question managers really care about. The idea that “a happy worker is a productive worker” has been around for a long time, and for many years researchers thought the link was quite weak.
The most cited review is a meta-analysis by Timothy Judge, Carl Thoresen, Joyce Bono and Gregory Patton (2001). They combined 312 samples covering over 54,000 people and estimated the average corrected correlation between overall job satisfaction and job performance at about .30.
What does .30 mean? It’s a moderate relationship. It’s real, but it’s far from a guarantee. Lots of satisfied people are average performers, and some unhappy people still work very hard.
We’ve also got to be careful about cause and effect. A correlation doesn’t tell us which way the arrow points. Satisfaction might lead to better performance. But performing well, and being recognized for it, might also lead to satisfaction. Judge and colleagues reviewed several models of the relationship and found that none had been clearly proven.
So a manager shouldn’t assume that running a team-building day will lift productivity. The relationship is there, but it’s not that simple.
What Else Does Job Satisfaction Affect?
Performance isn’t the only outcome. Let’s look at the others that come up most often.
Turnover and Absence
Dissatisfied employees are more likely to quit. A large meta-analysis of turnover research by Griffeth, Hom and Gaertner (2000) found job satisfaction was one of the predictors of leaving, although only a modest one. Other things get in the way, such as how easy it is to find another job. In a tight job market, unhappy people may stay because they have nowhere else to go.
For the hospital, this is probably the biggest risk with Tom. Experienced nurses are expensive and slow to replace.
Going Beyond the Job Description
Satisfied employees also tend to do more of the helpful things nobody formally asks them to do, such as covering for a colleague, helping a new starter, or speaking well of the organization. Researchers call this organizational citizenship behavior.
How Do Dissatisfied Employees Respond?
Not everyone who is unhappy quits. A useful framework here is the exit, voice, loyalty and neglect model, which grew out of Albert Hirschman’s (1970) work on exit and voice and was developed for employees by Caryl Rusbult, Dan Farrell and colleagues in the 1980s. It suggests four broad responses:
- Exit: looking for another job or resigning.
- Voice: raising the problem and suggesting improvements.
- Loyalty: waiting quietly and hoping things get better.
- Neglect: letting things slide, with more lateness, absence and errors.
Exit and neglect are destructive from the organization’s point of view. Voice and loyalty are more constructive. So what would we want from Tom? Ideally voice. If he tells the nurse unit manager about his frustration with promotion, there’s a chance to fix it. If he moves to neglect, patients and colleagues feel it.
What Can Managers Do?
Imagine you’re Tom’s nurse unit manager. What could you actually do?
- Find out where the problem is. Use a facet survey or simply ask. Tom’s issue is promotion and feedback, not pay or workload, so a pay rise wouldn’t help much.
- Look at the job design. Could Tom get more feedback on night shifts, or more variety, or a project that uses his experience?
- Be fair and open about promotion. Explain why he missed out and what he’d need to do next time.
- Make voice easy. If people can raise problems without risk, more of them will choose voice over exit or neglect.
There’s a trade-off too. Satisfaction surveys can raise expectations. If staff fill in a survey every year and nothing changes, it can make things worse. So only measure what you’re prepared to act on.
It’s also worth knowing that job satisfaction isn’t the same as engagement. A satisfied employee is content with the job. An engaged employee is energized by it and puts in extra effort. You can be satisfied without being particularly engaged. See our article on leadership styles and employee engagement for more on that side of things.
Key Points to Take Away
- Job satisfaction is an attitude: how positively or negatively a person feels about their job, based on their own appraisal of it (Locke, 1976).
- It can be measured with a single overall question or by facets such as the work itself, pay, promotion, supervision and co-workers.
- The work itself, fairness, the immediate manager and co-workers all shape satisfaction. Pay level matters less than most people think.
- Satisfaction and performance are moderately related (about .30 in Judge and colleagues’ 2001 meta-analysis), but the direction of cause and effect isn’t settled.
- Dissatisfaction is linked to turnover and can show up as exit, voice, loyalty or neglect.
- Managers get the most from satisfaction data when they find out which part of the job is the problem and act on it.
Sources
- Judge, T. A., Thoresen, C. J., Bono, J. E., & Patton, G. K. (2001). The job satisfaction-job performance relationship: A qualitative and quantitative review. Psychological Bulletin, 127(3), 376-407. PubMed abstract
- Judge, T. A., Piccolo, R. F., Podsakoff, N. P., Shaw, J. C., & Rich, B. L. (2010). The relationship between pay and job satisfaction: A meta-analysis of the literature. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 77(2), 157-167. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2010.04.002
- Wanous, J. P., Reichers, A. E., & Hudy, M. J. (1997). Overall job satisfaction: How good are single-item measures? Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(2), 247-252. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.82.2.247
- Griffeth, R. W., Hom, P. W., & Gaertner, S. (2000). A meta-analysis of antecedents and correlates of employee turnover. Journal of Management, 26(3), 463-488. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920630002600305