Principles of Organizational Behavior, 3rd Edition

8Promote Job Satisfaction Through Mental Challenge

TIMOTHY A. JUDGE¹, RYAN KLINGER², AND MENG LI³

¹ The Ohio State University

² Old Dominion University

³ Kincentric

The most popular definition of job satisfaction was supplied by Locke (1976), who defined it as “… a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's job or job experiences” (p. 1304). There are many possible influences on how favorably one appraises one's job, and numerous theories of job satisfaction have attempted to delineate these influences. Empirical evidence, however, has suggested only one clear attribute of the work itself that consistently influences job satisfaction – the cognitive challenge of the work. This leads to the general principle that will be the focus of this chapter – that mentally challenging work is the key to job satisfaction. Thus, the most effective way an organization can promote the job satisfaction of its employees is to enhance the mental challenge in their jobs, and the most consequential way most individuals can improve their own job satisfaction is to seek out mentally challenging work.

Before discussing this principle in more detail, however, it is important to demonstrate the importance of the principle. Scores on a valid measure of job satisfaction are the most important pieces of information organizations can collect, not only as one measure of management effectiveness, but because, as we will note, job satisfaction scores predict a wide range ...