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Roland T. Rust: Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Greg L. Stewart: Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Heather Miller: M/A/R/C Group, USA
Debbie Pielack: MBA Enterprise Corps, Lithuania
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The authors thank the Tennessee Health Care Association and Vanderbilt's Center for Service Marketing for their support of this project, and also thank Suzanne Moore, Leslie Nier, and Richard Sadler for their many comments and suggestions.
Introduction
Employee satisfaction is perhaps the most frequently studied construct in the organizational sciences (Schneider and Brief, 1992), with over 5,000 articles and dissertations having been written on the topic to date (Cranny et al., 1992). This research has provided a host of studies attempting to measure satisfaction, its antecedents and its consequences. Yet, most organizations continue to struggle in their efforts to measure and improve employee attitudes related to work. This paper presents a new framework for understanding employee satisfaction, and then reports the results of a study designed to test the utility of the new framework in an organizational setting.
Employee satisfaction (often referred to as job satisfaction) has been defined as "a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of ones job or job experiences" (Locke, 1976, p. 1300). The link between this emotional state and performance has historically been challenged (Brayfield and Crockett, 1955; Organ, 1977; Vroom, 1964). However, a meta-analysis conducted by Petty et al. (1984) concluded that job satisfaction and performance are indeed positively correlated (r = 0.23, uncorrected). Moreover, job satisfaction has been shown to relate positively with specific facets of performance like organizational citizenship behaviour (Organ, 1988; Smithet al., 1983), which is employee behaviour that is not formally required in a job description but that is nevertheless critical for organizational success (e.g. helping co-workers, volunteering for extra assignments).
An even more widely accepted relationship is the link between employee satisfaction and employee turnover. Models of employee turnover almost universally propose a negative relationship between satisfaction and turnover (Hom and Griffeth, 1991; Hulin et al., 1985; March and Simon, 1958; Mobleyet al., 1979; Price and Mueller, 1986; Rusbult and Farrell, 1983). More importantly, three meta-analyses have concluded that such a link exists (Carsten and Spector, 1987; Hom and Griffeth, 1995; Steel and...