Comparative Review of Job Satisfaction Instruments

Job satisfaction means different things to different people, but at its simplest, it reflects a person’s overall assessment of their job, particularly their emotions, behaviors, and attitudes about their work experience. On the surface, it bears a lot of resemblance to employee engagement, but the two are distinct: employee engagement involves employees’ discretionary effort they apply to their jobs, how committed and motivated they go beyond merely having the jobs meet their satisfaction.
Although job satisfaction research has been carried out for decades and is considered one of the most heavily researched topics in industrial–organizational psychology with several thousand published studies, there is only one relatively recent overview of job satisfaction instruments in which the quality and adequacy of their psychometric characteristics has been assessed. This study performed by a group of Dutch Occupational Medical researchers (Saane et al., 2003), offers a systematic review of 29 different instruments used to measure job satisfaction on their internal consistency, construct validity and responsiveness. Additionally, a total of eleven categorized work factors were considered to represent the content of job satisfaction, namely work content, autonomy, growth/development, financial rewards, promotion, supervision, communication, co-workers, meaningfulness, workload, and work demands.
This paper will review three instruments and offer a comparison of their characteristics and to what extent they meet the psychometric quality criteria.
While many different job satisfaction instruments exist, according to the Dutch study only a few meet several criteria for a high level of reliability and construct validity, of which the Measurement of Job Satisfaction [MJS] is one. One of the most popular instruments, the Job Descriptive Index [JDI], is not.
The JDI was originally developed in the late 1960s by Patricia Cain Smith and her colleagues at Cornell University

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