Job Attitudes
Judge, T. A., Weiss, H. M., Kammeyer-Mueller, J. D. & Hulin, C. L. · 2017
Also known as: Job Satisfaction
The job attitudes tradition treats job satisfaction as a global evaluative judgement about one's job — a genuine attitude with cognitive and affective components — rather than as a sum of satisfaction with separate facets. The global and facet approaches answer different questions: facet measures tell an employer which aspects of work to change, while global measures predict outcomes such as turnover and performance better than any facet total. The related attitude of organizational commitment is separable from satisfaction and predicts retention through a partly different route.
Framework treating job satisfaction as a global evaluative judgment about one's job — a pleasurable emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's work — distinct from facet satisfactions (pay, supervision, colleagues) and from mood at work. Global measures like the MOAQ-JSS capture the overall appraisal directly rather than summing facets.
- Source:
- Locke, E. A. (1976). The nature and causes of job satisfaction. In M. D. Dunnette (Ed.), Handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (pp. 1297-1349). Chicago: Rand McNally.
Take a validated test built on this theory
Reading about a construct tells you what it is. A validated instrument tells you where you stand on it. Free to take, results in minutes.
Evidence at a glance
- Empirical support
- Strong evidence
- Replication
- Well replicated
- Cross-cultural
- Mostly universal
- Meta-analyses
- 30 indexed
These ratings summarise the published literature on the theory, not the quality of any single test built on it. They are editorial judgements based on the sources listed below, and they change as evidence accumulates.
Historical Context
Job satisfaction measurement began with Hoppock in 1935 and grew through the mid-century facet instruments — the Job Descriptive Index in 1969, the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire in 1967 — which dominated for decades. Brief and Weiss's affective events theory in the 1990s and 2000s challenged the purely cognitive reading by showing that discrete workplace events produce mood states that shape attitudes over time. Judge and colleagues' 2017 centennial review consolidated a hundred years of evidence and settled several long-running disputes, including the modest but real satisfaction-performance relationship.
Constructs
General Job Satisfaction
The global evaluative judgment of one's job as a whole — a pleasurable emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's work (Locke, 1976) — measured directly rather than by summing facet satisfactions such as pay, supervision, or colleagues. As operationalized by the MOAQ-JSS (Cammann et al., 1983), it captures the overall verdict the job's pieces add up to; it moves more slowly than mood and is distinct from momentary affective states at work.
Instruments
- Michigan Organizational Assessment Questionnaire — Job Satisfaction Subscale(MOAQ-JSS)Cammann, Fichman, Jenkins & Klesh1983
Tests built on this theory
Practical Applications
Job satisfaction and commitment are the core outcomes of employee surveys and are the standard criteria against which organizational interventions are evaluated. Satisfaction predicts turnover, absenteeism, citizenship behaviour and, at unit level, customer satisfaction and profitability. Judge and colleagues' meta-analysis established the satisfaction-performance correlation at around .30, refuting the long-repeated claim that happy workers are no more productive while also refuting the stronger managerial version of the claim.
How It's Measured
Measured with global self-report evaluative items and, separately, facet scales; global scores predict behavioural outcomes better, while facet scores identify what to change.
Critiques & Limitations
Single-item and short global measures are convenient but discard information and are strongly influenced by transient mood and by question context. Satisfaction has a substantial dispositional component — twin studies find meaningful heritability, and satisfaction is stable across job changes — which limits how much any organizational intervention can move it. Common-method variance inflates its correlations with other self-reported outcomes. There is also a critical-theory objection that satisfaction surveys measure adaptation to conditions, since people adjust expectations downward under constraint and report satisfaction with objectively poor work.
Key Publications
- Judge, T. A., Weiss, H. M., Kammeyer-Mueller, J. D. & Hulin, C. L.. (2017). Job attitudes, job satisfaction, and job affect: A century of continuity and of change. 10.1037/apl0000181
- Judge, T. A., Thoresen, C. J., Bono, J. E. & Patton, G. K.. (2001). The job satisfaction-job performance relationship: A qualitative and quantitative review. 10.1037/0033-2909.127.3.376
- Weiss, H. M. & Cropanzano, R.. (1996). Affective events theory: A theoretical discussion of the structure, causes and consequences of affective experiences at work.