Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction is a person’s evaluation of his or her job and work context (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996). Porter and Lawler (1968) believed that job satisfaction refers to the difference between what employees expect and exactly received. It is an appraisal of the perceived job characteristics and emotional experiences at work (McShane &Von Glinow, 2000).

Job satisfaction is actually a collection of attitudes about specific facets of the job. Employees may be satisfied with one element and dissatisfied with the other element of the job at the same time. Smith, Kendall, and Hulin(1969) identified five dimensions for job satisfaction as core task, pay, promotion, supervisor, and colleagues. They used those five dimensions for evaluating individuals’ job satisfaction. Porter and Lawler (1968) proposed that there should be two dimensions in job satisfaction. Those are intrinsic satisfaction, extrinsic satisfaction.

When employees are given challenging tasks, the sense of achievement gives employees valuable satisfaction. This intrinsic satisfaction is originated from the job itself. Any of the satisfaction originates from job itself belongs to intrinsic satisfaction. Extrinsic satisfaction refers to those rewards given to the employees such as pay, environment, or the working environment, situations…etc., which are not originated from but related to job itself. The satisfaction toward the overall job refers to general satisfaction, which is the average of intrinsic satisfaction and extrinsic satisfaction.

Job satisfaction is wildly used to be the dependent variable in researches. Many of them used overall job satisfaction rating instead of specific one. However, McShane and Von Glinow, (2000) mentioned in their book, overall satisfaction ratings are inflated. For example, overall job satisfaction survey generally is high, nevertheless, people report much lower levels for specific job satisfaction.

Job satisfaction is recruited to be the outcomes of perceptions of organizational politics and locus of control in this research. In this research job satisfaction will be divided into two dimensions in order to test the significant impact from perceptions of organizational politics.