Date of Award

1989

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation was threefold: (a) to review the current status of the job satisfaction construct, (b) to evaluate how well modern scale development guidelines can produce a satisfaction measure that will be reliable and valid, and (c) to investigate the relationships among satisfaction, stress, and other organizational outcomes.;The first chapter contains three sections. The first is a historical review. The second focuses on measurement concerns from the review. The third section reviews the shortcomings of the literature and how some of these shortcomings might be overcome by considering job satisfaction from a psychometric perspective.;The second chapter outlines the development of a measure of job satisfaction, the Satisfaction Research Questionnaire. The development strategy, readability, reliability, and construct validity are described. An argument is presented for a classification of satisfaction based on model profiles. This classification yielded two bipolar modal profiles of scores.;The third chapter presents empirical results from two samples, a cross-Canada study and a student sample. Five content domains were tapped in this study: (a) respondent information about themselves, (b) response information about their occupations for use in monomethod multitrait comparisons, (c) the Satisfaction Research Questionnaire and another measure (the Job Descriptive Index), (d) a measure of the social desirability response bias, and (e) a measure of the Type A behaviour pattern, as a measure of stress.;The results suggested that the Satisfaction Research Questionnaire would be a viable alternative measure of satisfaction. A robust relationship between satisfaction and stress was evidenced. The differences between this research and historical results were attributed to several factors, including, (a) a modern scale construction approach, (b) the use of modal profile analysis, and (c) a multivariate conceptualization of job satisfaction.

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