By Maya Baltazar Herrera

Much has been written about job satisfaction. Presumably this is because there is evidence to the effect that job satisfaction leads to such favorable job outcomes as increased performance and retention.

Similarly, much has been written concerning the role of clearly articulated goals, freely chosen, both in managing performance on the job as well as in the attainment of personal goals. This explains the existence of formal performance planning and career planning processes in many organizations.

In fact, research shows that individuals who have had the opportunity to have a mentoring relationship with a successful individual are more likely to succeed. This explains the sudden proliferation of formal coaching and mentoring programs in many corporations. However, a clear distinction is normally made between the coaching and the mentoring relationships and most corporations are wary of including the personal dimension in any formal program. For many reasons including privacy, the personal dimension of planning is generally introduced as optional and voluntary and is almost never a formal part of the corporate program.

However, there is overwhelming evidence of the spillover effects between job satisfaction and life satisfaction. Clearly, happiness on the job spills over into happiness in personal life and vice versa.

Satisfaction and performance

While there seems to be disagreement about the strength of the correlation between satisfaction and performance, most of the literature concedes that there is some positive linkage between job satisfaction and job performance.

Fisher (2003) explains that a number of studies, including a comprehensive review by Judge, Thoresen, Bono & Patton in 2001, have shown that the correlations between job satisfaction and employee performance are ?positive but relatively weak?.

Further studies, however, have challenged these findings. Increasingly, research is pointing to the notion that satisfaction and performance are deeply intertwined. There is a seemingly universal belief that happy people will work better, and empirically speaking, there is a strong relationship between momentary satisfaction and momentary performance on the personal level (Fisher, 2003). Saari and Judge (2004) cite findings that show job performance to be predicted by job satisfaction, a relationship that is especially pronounced in professional jobs.

Based on cross-sectional evidence from previous research, Boehm & Lyubomirsky (2008) show that happiness can lead to success in the workplace. The study found that employees with high positive affect (think positive point of view) choose jobs that are more meaningful to them, have a higher degree of autonomy, accommodate a wider array of tasks and responsibilities, and are more likely to view difficult times as challenges that can be overcome. Employees that exhibit positive affect are also more likely to receive support from superiors and peers. In addition, they found that happy students are rated to have higher managerial potential than others, and happy people are also more likely to exhibit organizational citizenship and encourage it among their co-workers. In laboratory settings, people in happier moods often perform better than those in neutral or somber moods (Boehm & Lyubomirsky, 2008). Other research (Gaylor) found that job satisfaction, unsurprisingly, has a strong inverse relation to the intention to resign, and that pay is not such an important factor if the employee has already made the decision to leave.

So there does seem to be reason to pursue job satisfaction as a human resources outcome.

Roots of satisfaction

There is research establishing that personality factors, separate from life or job attributes, affect both job and life satisfaction (Bono & Judge, 2003; Judge et al, 1998). A meta-analysis by Judge, Heller and Mount (2002) showed the usefulness of the five-factor personality model in analyzing the dispositional source of job satisfaction. Neuroticism (characterized by anxiety, insecurity, and dissatisfaction with oneself) had the strongest correlation (inverse) with job satisfaction, followed by conscientiousness. The study, however, says that while the five factor personality model (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) seems promising, there are also other models that can be used to explore the dispositional source of job satisfaction, such as the Positive Affect/Negative Affect model and core self-evaluations.

Core evaluations of the self, one of the dispositional sources of job satisfaction, are composed of four key areas: self-esteem, generalized self-efficacy, internal locus of control, and non-neuroticism. Self-esteem pertains to issues of confidence and respect of the individual person; generalized self-efficacy deals with the competencies and skills a person believes he or she possesses to deal with varying situations; internal locus of control refers to an individual?s beliefs about the causes of both good and bad things that happen in his or her life; and non-neuroticism refers to the tendency to experience enduring negative emotions. It has been hypothesized and proven that ?core evaluations of the self have consistent effects on job satisfaction, independent of the attributes of the job itself...people who consider themselves worthy and able to cope with life?s exigencies bring a ?positive frame? to the events and situations they encounter, whereas people who do not see themselves as worthy and able bring a negative frame to the same situations? (Judge, Locke, Durham, & Kluger, 1998).

Studies cite a relationship between job performance and core self-evaluations, as individuals with positive self-evaluations were more motivated to work than individuals who did not have positive self-evaluations (Bono & Judge, 2003). Even intuitively, this makes sense, because people don?t tend to set lofty and challenging goals if they think they are unlikely to achieve them anyway.

A meta-analysis by Bono and Judge (2003) reveals that studies cite a strong relationship between job satisfaction and the core self-evaluations, and that intrinsic job characteristics mediate this relationship. Positive individuals supposedly obtain more challenging jobs, and are more likely to draw fulfillment from what they do. Another study found that core evaluations of the self have consistent effects on job satisfaction, independent of the attributes of the job itself, with self-esteem and self-efficacy contributing most to positive core self-evaluations (Judge, Locke, Durham & Kluger, 1998). Core self-evaluations also affect the appraisals of actual work attributes used in making satisfaction judgments. Although the jury is still out on the significance of job characteristics, the consensus, regardless, is that positive core self-evaluations and job satisfaction are highly correlated. In addition, studies also support the theory that the same mechanism holds for relating neuroticism (the opposite of positive self-evaluations) with non-job satisfaction and non-job performance.

(Continued next week)

Readers can e-mail Maya at integrations_manila@yahoo.com. Or visit her site at http://www.mayaherrera.com.