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Category: Job Satisfaction

  • Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment

    In the last byte, we looked at what a manager would have to do in order to enhance organizational commitment. In today’s byte we shall look at the relation between job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

    We have already understood the importance of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Given the benefits that an organization would accrue from improving these two important work attitudes, every manager would strive to improve these.

    These 2 work attitudes are extremely interrelated, both affective and normative commitments are related to job satisfaction. It has also been found that increasing the job satisfaction also increases the commitment of an employee towards the organization.

    Managers could begin their act in this direction by taking an attitude survey to understand the employee’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction with specific facets of their jobs. They could then chalk out an action plan to make the deficient aspects of the job more satisfying.

    Since work attitude influence the business outcomes, it is important that they carefully looked at. Job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior is seen to have a very close alignment with the customer satisfaction and company profitability.

  • Work Attitude – Job Satisfaction – 2

    In the last byte, we discussed an interesting concept – Organizational Citizenship Behavior. In today’s byte we continue our discussion about work attitude and deal specifically a certain interesting aspects in the study of job satisfaction and the behavior of people, also talk about how cultures impacts job satisfaction.


    It is common human behavior to avoid something that is not pleasing, work too is no exception to this. A common employee behavior that is seen when something is not enjoyable at office, employees tend to delay the closure of what they see as a seemingly uninteresting job. They do this by avoiding devoting time on it, there by delaying it. Another behavior that is seen in employees when they do not enjoy their work is abscentism. It is generally seen that the worker’s dissatisfaction with work is the main reason for people being absent at work.


    Job Satisfaction is also influenced by the culture. For the sake of discussion, we could take the scene in the United States and Korea. American Managers place a high value on outcomes, autonomy, independence and achievement; this is in line with the belief that “works for its own sake” and this is central part of their life. The Koreans in contrast are found to place family before work. The Americans are found to find greater job satisfaction through intrinsic job factors while Koreans are found to prefer extrinsic factors.


    The current global nature of work requires managers to understand that job satisfaction is significantly affected by culture.

  • 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.