Essentials of Organizational Behavior, 14/e

Measuring Job Satisfaction

Our definition of job satisfaction—a positive feeling about a job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics—is broad. Yet that breadth is appropriate. A job is more than just shuffling papers, writing programming code, waiting on customers, or driving a truck. Jobs require interacting with coworkers and bosses, following organizational rules and policies, determining the power structure, meeting performance standards, living with less-than-ideal working conditions, adapting to new technologies, and so forth. An employee’s assessment of satisfaction with the job is thus a complex summation of many discrete elements. How, then, do we measure it?

Approaches to Measurement

Two approaches are popular. The single ...