preview

Job Satisfaction

Good Essays

Contentment (or lack of it) arising out of interplay of employee's positive and negative feelings toward his or her work. Job satisfaction has been defined as a pleasurable emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job;[1] an affective reaction to one’s job;[2] and an attitude towards one’s job.[3] Weiss (2002) has argued that job satisfaction is an attitude but points out that researchers should clearly distinguish the objects of cognitive evaluation which are affect (emotion), beliefs and behaviours.[4] This definition suggests that we form attitudes towards our jobs by taking into account our feelings, our beliefs, and our behaviors. Definition of Job Satisfaction To begin a discussion on job satisfaction, one might …show more content…

At the lowest tier, basic life sustaining needs such as water, food, and shelter were identified. The next level consisted of physical and financial security, while the third tier included needs of social acceptance, Situational Theories The situational occurrences theory emerged in 1992, when Quarstein, McAfee, and Glassman stated that job satisfaction is determined by two factors: situational characteristics and situational occurrences. Situational characteristics are things such as pay, supervision, working conditions, promotional opportunities, and company policies that typically are considered by the employee before accepting the job. The situational occurrences are things that occur after taking a job that may be tangible or intangible, positive or negative. Positive occurrences might include 16 extra vacation time, while negative occurrences might entail faulty equipment or strained coworker relationships. Within this theoretical framework, job satisfaction is a product of both situational factors and situational occurrences. Measurement of Job Satisfaction Measuring job satisfaction is difficult, for it is an abstract personal cognition that exists only in an individual’s mind. To measure job satisfaction, one must have a conceptual understanding of the construct in order to decide what indirect factors to measure. Since there is no single agreed upon definition of job satisfaction, and no widely accepted theory to explain it, it is

Get Access