The Importance of Job Satisfaction

This essay examines the importance of job satisfaction in the workplace and its relationship with other factors which are prominent in an organisation. Different definitions of ‘Job Satisfaction' will be explored in order to have comprehensive insight of the term itself. The importance of employee attitudes like job satisfaction in workplace and its impact on organisation will be critically discussed. Hence there will be more emphasis on individual's job involvement and organisational commitment in conveying their job satisfaction. We raise the question of whether everybody at work want or look for job satisfaction. There are many employee conducts and consequences that bring about satisfaction and dissatisfaction at work. Many of these factors can directly or indirectly affect the job satisfaction, and have relative correlation with them. Relationship between these factors and job satisfaction will be looked in detail; more like a cause and effect analysis. The correlation between Job satisfaction and job performance, job satisfaction and motivation, organisational performance like Turnover will be discussed. At the end this paper, a protuberant conclusion will be drawn on the overall impact job satisfaction has on an individual and the organisation and also the different factors that are affected by job satisfaction.

Specific employee attitudes relating to job satisfaction and other important organizational factors are of major interest to the field of organizational behaviour and the practice of human resource management. According to Saari (2004) employee attitudes are their viewpoints on different aspects of their job, their career and their organisation. Employee's attitude has direct impact on job satisfaction. However, the major factor in job satisfaction is actually being satisfied with the ‘job' itself (Rehman, 2011, p168) .This can also help in understanding what causes people to be satisfied in a job. A widely recognised explanation of job satisfaction was offered by Locke (1976) who defines job satisfaction as "…pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from appraisal of one's job or job experiences" (Rehman, 2011, p167). In addition, job satisfaction was identified has emotional, cognitive and behavioural components (Bernstein & Nash, 2008).However, Spector (1997, p2) describes job satisfaction as how one feels about their job and different phases of their job; he classifies the extent to which they like as satisfaction and to which they dislike as dissatisfaction. On the other hand, Wright & Cropanzano base their definition of Job satisfaction on how an individual feels and what they think (Wight, 2006, p262) .Job satisfaction is a result of employee's outlook of how good their job delivers those things that they view as essential. Though job satisfaction is an attitude about the work and the organization, there are number of facets which influence it, including