The term ‘job satisfaction’ refers to an employee’s general happiness with his or her job. Locke defines job satisfaction as a “pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job experiences”. For our purposes job satisfaction will be defined as the amount of overall positive affect or feelings that individuals have towards their job.
Job satisfaction is the result of various attitudes the employee holds towards his job, towards related factors and towards life in general.
The importance of job Satisfaction is that if the people are satisfied with their work, then there is an improvement in both the quality and quantity of production. If they are not satisfied, then both the quantity and quality of his output will be low, there will be high absenteeism and employee turnover and increased unionism.
Caldur and Schurr in 1981 suggested that there are three different approaches to evaluating job satisfaction. The first approach is that work attitudes such as job satisfaction are dispositional in nature, i.e., they are stable, positive or negative disposition learned through experiences. The second approach is the ‘social information processing model’, which suggests that job satisfaction and other work place attitudes are developed or constructed out of experiences and information provided by others at the work place. The third approach is the if information processing model’, which is based on the accumulation of cognitive information about the -work place and one’s job. In a sense, this is the most obvious approach, as it argues that a person’s job satisfaction is influenced directly by the characteristics of their job.
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