Job Attitudes: Cognition and Affect

Abstract

Job satisfaction—how people think and feel about their jobs—is among the most extensively studied constructs in organizational psychology. I review theories of the antecedents and consequences of job satisfaction, assigning prominence to both seminal models (e.g., the Cornell Model) and contemporary ones (e.g., Affective Events Theory, the Unfolding Model). I also discuss the measurement of the cognitive and affective (emotional) components of job satisfaction. In addition, I describe several promising avenues for future research. One such avenue involves another job attitude, employee engagement, and issues concerning its differentiability from job satisfaction and other job attitudes. Another avenue, pertaining primarily to the affective component of job satisfaction, involves a reconceptualization of many phenomena of considerable interest to organizational researchers (including, but not limited to, job performance, work–family conflict, organizational justice and emotional labor) as at least partially within-person phenomena—leading, ultimately, to a within-person organizational psychology. Overall, research on job satisfaction is vibrant and promises to remain so for the foreseeable future.

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