Work Attitude - Job Satisfaction

In the last byte, we looked at work attitudes and how it is could be influenced by the work environment. In today's byte, we look at specific work attitude - Job Satisfaction.

Job satisfaction refers to a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's job or job experience. In many ways it is a general attitude, but creates a satisfactory feeling through the combination of five specific dimensions:

1. The Pay
2. The Work itself
3. Promotion opportunities
4. Supervision
5. Coworkers who work with you

Given that job satisfaction has different dimensions, it is possible that one would be satisfied with one of these dimensions but be dissatisfied with other dimensions. As an employee you could possibly be satisfied with the pay but not the promotion policy and the work that you do could be thoroughly hated while the coworkers could be extremely cooperative and give you satisfaction of working with them.  It is generally seen that Challenging work, competent supervision, opportunities of advancement, valued rewards along with supportive coworkers are dimensions that lead to satisfaction.

It is a commonly held belief that happy or satisfied employees are more productive at work. It is also true that most of us feel satisfied when we believe we are performing better than usual. If the first one true, the all that a manager would need to do is keep the workers happy and this would automatically improve the performance. In the latter case the manager would need to ensure that the employee performs well, and this would lead to satisfaction. It is clear from our argument above that the relation is not so straight forward.

The possible reason why this is not so straight forward could be

• the inherent difficulty in demonstrating the attitude - behavior link
• the dimension of "reward" is one of the main sources that make this relation difficult to answer.