JOB SATISFACTION AND EMPLOYEES' PERFORMANCE

Making People Satisfy in and With Their Jobs Generates High Employee Performance: A Discussion

Making People Satisfy in and With Their Jobs Generates High Employee Performance: A Discussion

Introduction

Job satisfaction refers to the overall feelings one has and the evaluation one makes about one's job. People with high job satisfaction experience a pleasurable or positive emotional state when they think about their job or job experiences. In simple terms, they like their jobs. Moorhead and Griffin (2000) mention since early studies in the 1930s, job satisfaction has become one of the most widely investigated concepts in the field of industrial/organizational psychology. It is a valuable outcome in its own right but also a driver of other important individual and organizational outcomes. The importance of this concept is reflected in its central role in numerous theories, such as those concerning job design, leadership, and employee withdrawal (Moorhead and Griffin, 2000). This paper discusses that making people satisfy in and with their jobs generates high employee performance.

Discussion

Job satisfaction refers to an individual's subjective well-being at work. Because of its subjective nature, job satisfaction has not received much attention by mainstream economists in the United States. However, job satisfaction has long been a primary concern of industrial and organizational psychologists and sociologists.

Interest in job satisfaction developed out of, or in response to, early theories of individual work motivation used by industrial engineers in the early 20th century. Following the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) on so-called scientific management, much of the focus of industrial engineering during the 20th century was based on the theory that workers will shirk or avoid work, if possible, and therefore need to be coerced to expend maximal effort, primarily through close supervision and properly designed wage incentives. An early competing theory of motivation came from the “human relations” movement and, in particular, the work of George Elton Mayo (1880-1949). Based on his Hawthorne experiments, Mayo argued that emotional factors are more important in determining productivity than “logical” factors (Moorhead and Griffin, 2000). Work arrangements, Mayo suggested, must be organized to address workers' subjective needs for satisfaction as well as the requirements for efficient production. The human relations movement emphasized managerial leadership and work design and eventually developed into the modern human resources school of management.

Studying job satisfaction is important not simply for improving the well-being of workers; much of the research attempts to help management improve the efficiency and quality of workers' output. Worker resistance to Taylorist scientific management, often experienced as limiting individual autonomy and increasing stress, has generated resentment and dissatisfaction in the workplace, leading to productivity and quality problems. This worker dissatisfaction has been an important factor in the establishment of human resources departments in many firms, quality of working life programs in the 1970s, and, more recently, efforts to increase employee involvement through arrangements such as quality circles and teamwork (Judge, et al, 2001).

Much of contemporary theory and research on job satisfaction has been in reaction to a prominent social ...