Journal of Management History

The emergence of job satisfaction in organizational behavior: A historical overview of

the dawn of job attitude research
Thomas A. Wright
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Management History, Vol. 12 Iss 3 pp. 262 - 277
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JMH
12,3 The emergence of job satisfaction
in organizational behavior
A historical overview of the dawn of job
262 attitude research
Thomas A. Wright
Managerial Sciences Department, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, USA

Abstract
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Purpose – Based more on practical (and contextual), rather than theoretical grounds, over time, job
satisfaction came to be the work attitude of choice for many early researchers interested in studying
the relationship between employee attitudes and efficiency. Surprisingly, research examining the basis
for why this belief is practically nonexistent. This paper addresses this apparent void in the
organizational literature.
Design/methodology/approach – First, a historical overview of the development of job attitudes is
introduced. Second, incorporating important early, but now mostly forgotten, research on employee
boredom, fatigue and customer satisfaction, a “missing link” explanation is presented for job
satisfaction eventually becoming the “job attitude of choice” in organizational research.
Findings – Integrating early research from two long-forgotten streams of organizational research,
this paper provides a practical (and contextual) framework for why job satisfaction became the most
widely used measure of happiness in the happy/productive worker thesis.
Practical implications – Future research endeavors on the happy/productive worker thesis might
greatly benefit from an awareness of the important, but now mostly forgotten, stream of early research
on worker well-being.
Originality/value – This historical paper provides the reader with a better understanding of the
contextual framework for how the fascination with job satisfaction developed over time.
Keywords History, Attitudes, Job satisfaction
Paper type General review

Perhaps the central objective of modern labor management and personnel work can be said to
be the heightening of morale or improving of workers’ attitudes (Kornhauser, 1930).
As was true for Kornhauser and his contemporaries fully 75 years ago, efforts to
improve employee attitudes remain of paramount importance in the management
sciences (Brief and Weiss, 2002; George, 1992). Nowhere is this importance more
evident than in the proliferation of organizational research over the years examining
job satisfaction. Although job satisfaction has been operationalized in many different
ways (Judge et al., 2001), it is usually considered to be an attitude (Weiss and
Cropanzano, 1996). In an attempt to provide further conceptual clarity, Weiss and
Cropanzano indicated the merit of distinguishing the belief, or cognitive, component of
Journal of Management History job satisfaction from its emotional, or affective, component. As noted by Wright and
Vol. 12 No. 3, 2006
pp. 262-277 Cropanzano (2000, p. 85), “this suggests that job satisfaction is based partially on what
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1751-1348
one feels and partially on what one thinks.” In any event, job satisfaction is, by far, the
DOI 10.1108/17511340610670179 most frequently studied variable in organizational research, with more than 10,000
 studies published to date (Spector, 1997). One obvious reason for this continued interest Historical
in job satisfaction has been its long assumed role in the prediction of employee analysis
efficiency (Hersey, 1929, 1932a, b; Kornhauser, 1933; McMurry, 1932; Pennock, 1930;
Snow, 1927).
Among these early researchers, McMurry (1932, p. 202) well expressed this belief in
noting the importance in determining the relationship between “employee efficiency
and work-satisfaction.” Starting slowly in the mid-1930s (Hoppock and Spiegler, 1938), 263
developing more fully during World War II (Brayfield and Crockett, 1955), and
certainly well evidenced by the early-1950s, job satisfaction increasingly came to be the
employee attitude of choice for researchers interested in better understanding what
came to be called the ”Holy Grail” of management research: the happy/productive
worker thesis (Landy, 1985; Weiss, 2002; Wright, 2005)[1]. However, a careful
consideration of the literature reveals a startling fact. Despite this increasingly
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widespread interest, research examining the “whys” surrounding this belief is

conspicuous by its absence.
The purpose of this research is to help better understand the contextual framework
for how this fascination with job satisfaction developed over time. To that end, and
using important early, but now mostly forgotten, research on employee boredom,
fatigue and customer satisfaction, this paper proposes a “missing link” explanation for
why job satisfaction became the most widely used attitudinal measure in
organizational research. But first, a brief historical overview of the development of
job attitudes is introduced.

Attitudes and early management science research

Allport (1935) proposed that the study of attitudes began in the late nineteenth century,
1888 to be precise, with Lange’s discovery that individuals instructed to concentrate on
being ready to press a key at the onset of a stimulus responded more rapidly than those
instructed to concentrate on the stimulus itself. This result was termed the subject’s
aufgab or task-attitude (Kiesler et al., 1969). Consistent with Lange’s laboratory
research, in the work context, a number of early industrial engineers, including
Fredrick Winslow Taylor and Frank Gilbreth, noted that the successful
implementation of the principles of scientific management involved not only issues
of physical strength and dexterity as they related to employee physical fatigue, but
also a “mental revolution” on the part of both management and employee (Gilbreth,
1911; Gilbreth and Gilbreth, 1917; Taylor, 1919). For instance, while primarily focusing
on the role of fatigue on employee output and achievement, Gilbreth (1911, p. 14) noted
that employee “contentment” also had a significant impact on output. In a like manner,
underlying Taylor’s basic philosophy was the implicit assumption that workers who
accepted the basic tenants of scientific management and, as a result, received the
highest possible wages, with the least amount of physical and mental fatigue, would be
the most “satisfied and productive.”
Another leading contemporary of Taylor (1919), the Industrial Psychologist,
Munsterberg (1913) focused not on physical fatigue, but on mental monotony or
boredom. More specifically, while Gilbreth (1911, p. 24) defined fatigue as being “due to
a secretion in the blood” of the worker, Munsterberg described monotony in terms of
unpleasant feelings that repetitious tasks aroused in workers. For Munsterberg,
monotony was quite different from fatigue, with monotony best categorized in terms of
 JMH employee level of susceptibility and best described as a psychological “feeling”
12,3 (Wright, 2005). Finally, the famous Hawthorne studies (and highly related work in
Great Britain conducted contemporaneously by Wyatt and others in the 1920s) began
as an investigation of the effects of such factors as rest pauses and incentives on
worker fatigue and monotony.
But the emphasis soon shifted to the study of “attitudes” when the employees failed
264 to respond in the “expected” manner to these changes (for additional discussions of the
history of attitudinal research in organizational behavior, see Weiss and Brief, 2001;
Wright, 2005). In short, the Hawthorne researchers in the USA and their British
counterparts (Vernon et al., 1924; Wyatt and Fraser, 1925; Wyatt et al., 1938)
“discovered” most definitely what Taylor, Munsterberg and other pioneers had
intuitively observed decades before: that workers have the ability to reason, and that
the appraisals they make of the work situation affect their reactions to it (Mayo, 1933).
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As with Taylor, the Gilbreths’ Munsterberg, and Wyatt and his colleagues, the term
attitude, in the contextual framework that the Hawthorne researchers used it, came to
be associated with any number of employee “feelings” and “sentiments.”
This definitional ambiguity as to what constitutes an attitude is partially due to the
early seminal work of Thurstone (1927, 1928, 1929) and Thurstone and Thurstone
(1930). In his seminal work entitled, “Attitudes can be measured,” Thurstone (1928)
proposed a broad definition of attitude, one incorporating the intensity of positive or
negative affect for or against a psychological object. In particular, Thurstone (1928, p.
531) broadly and grandly defined attitude as “the sum total of a man’s inclinations and
feelings, prejudice or bias, preconceived notions, ideas, threats, and convictions about
any specified topic.” On the basis of Thurstone’s pioneering work, three early scales
were developed to measure individual attitudes toward such topics as the church,
prohibition and militarism – pacifism (Hinckley, 1932).
Thurstone’s broad framework for defining attitude was highly influential on a
number of early researchers interested in various work attitudes. For example, in an
applied paper entitled, “The technique of measuring employee attitudes,” Kornhauser
(1933, p. 101) adopted Thurstone’s general perspective and referred to the term attitude
as being “conveniently vague” and having “no clear-cut psychological definition . . . ”
Other pioneering applied researchers were similarly vague in their definitions
(Uhrbrock, 1934). Irrespective of these conceptual and definitional issues, by the 1930s,
the study of work attitudes had evolved to the extent that Kornhauser (1933) was able
to list five primary methods for investigating them.

The five primary methods for work attitude measurement

The first approach was termed by Kornhauser as the “impressionistic” method.
Building on the work of Williams (1925), this approach was highly subjective and
informal in nature. Researcher impressions were formed on the basis of many
incidental observations of what employees said, how they said it, how they worked,
and how they played. The later influential writings of Homans (1950) and Whyte (1943)
well epitomize this impressionistic perspective. In a fascinating example of how this
approach worked, consider Williams’ (1925) research on the railroad industry. As a
historical, contextual backdrop, because they had skills that were hard to replace,
railroad workers were among the first to not only form local unions, but also to build a
national federation of their locals (Chandler, 1965). As a result, their brotherhoods
 became the strongest unions during the late nineteenth century, pioneering modern Historical
collective bargaining and grievance procedures (Chandler, 1965). However, with the analysis
advent of World War I, serious industrial relations problems arose in a number of
occupations, including the railroad industry. In an informative write-up, Williams
(1925) attributed the root cause of the railroad strife to a major disruption of the
nation’s wartime system of wages. Through conversations with the head of a railroad
brotherhood, Williams determined that governmental officials had arbitrarily changed 265
a number of job specific wage rates, without considering their possible
interrelationship with other job classification wage rates. The result was a severe
disruption to the long established system of wage parity across various job
classifications within the industry.
The second approach involved the unguided interview. Best demonstrated by
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Mayo (1933, p. 84), the interviewer was trained to ask no specific questions, but to
encourage employees to talk about subjects important to them, especially
“including employee attitudes and feelings . . . ” The importance and magnitude of
this approach is well demonstrated by its development at the Hawthorne plant.
Commencing with interviews of 1,600 employees in 1928, by the end of 1930, an
incredible 21,126 employees had been personally interviewed out of a total work
population of roughly 40,000. During the initial year (1928) of operation, Mayo
(1933) reported that the average interview lasted about 30 minutes. With increased
confidence in the procedure, coupled with the training of 43 new interviewers in
1929 alone, by 1930, the average interview lasted approximately 90 minutes and
Mayo (1933, p. 84) was able to enthusiastically report that the “employees enjoyed
the opportunity of expressing their thoughts.” Even considered within the context
of today’s more generally “enlightened” environment of human resource practices,
the consideration shown employees through this extensive interview process
remains quite impressive today, over 75 years later.
The unguided Hawthorne interview approach evolved into the third approach:
the guided interview format. According to Kornhauser (1933), early research efforts
varied as to the actual level of guidance. Typically, the interviewer had a specific
set of topics or questions, but did not subscribe to a particular set order of
questioning. This format left room for the employee, if the need arose, to branch off
into others topics of interest or concern. Prime examples of the use of this approach
involved Kornhauser’s own research at the Badger-Globe Mill of the Kimberly-Clark
Corporation (Kornhauser and Sharp, 1932) and prominent consulting psychologist,
Houser’s (1927) investigations in the manufacturing and public utilities industries.
In the Kimberly-Clark study, Kornhauser (1933, p. 102) conducted his interviews
from a list of approximately 50 questions, with full written notes being kept,
“including what the interviewer says and what the employee contributes even where
this is not related to any questions on the list.”
The fourth method involved the use of attitudinal question blanks. Once again,
Houser (1927, 1938)and his consulting associates were important in the development of
this approach. In this approach, Houser asked employees a number of simple questions
which could be answered by a simple “yes” or “no” format. This format was highly
instrumental to the development of later, more intricate methodologies (Kolstad, 1938),
as it allowed researchers to compile simple quantitative data regarding, for instance,
how satisfied/unsatisfied employees were on any number of workplace conditions.
 JMH The fifth, and final, approach in use by the 1930s involved the actual creation of
12,3 sophisticated scales, specifically designed to measure particular attitudes. Building on
the seminal work of Thurstone (1928, 1929) and Uhrbrock (1934) provided the results of
a large (N ¼ 4,430) study of employee attitudes in a manufacturing firm using a scale
composed of 50 items. Sample items included, “If I had to do it over again I’d still work
for this company” and “I think this company treats its employees better than any other
266 company does.” In findings that signaled later research interests on such topics as job
satisfaction, job and organizational commitment, and job involvement, Uhrbrock found
that supervisors were more favorably disposed to their company than general laborers,
while women were more favorably disposed than were men. Reviewing the body of
work on work attitudes to date, Uhrbrock (1934, p. 373) concluded that the use of
employee attitudinal research would be greatly helpful in determining how “to create a
loyal, cooperative attitude” in one’s employees. Likewise, and foreshadowing the
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widespread subsequent interest in the possible role of job satisfaction in the prediction
of employee efficiency and performance, Kornhauser (1933, p. 99) noted that,
“Management’s interest in employee attitudes arises from the belief that attitudes are
important determinants of efficiency.”

The advent of job satisfaction research

As a careful reading of both Kornhauser (1933) and Uhrbrock (1934), two early leading
lights of research on employee attitudes demonstrates, by the early-1930s, job
satisfaction had still not yet become the attitude of choice for the vast majority of
researchers in applied psychology and management. Certainly, one reason for this
failure involved the previously discussed definitional ambiguity surrounding what
constitutes an attitude (Thurstone, 1928). In fact, Organ and Near (1985) noted that a
number of prominent, early researchers appeared to not only confuse, but also
confound the terms “employee morale” and “job satisfaction”[2]. As a result, in his
seminal work, aptly titled, Job Satisfaction, Hoppock (1935, p. 47) was moved to note
that, “As an independent variable job (italics original) satisfaction may not even exist.”
Similarly, and apparently much to their surprise, Organ and Near (1985) noted that
the term “job satisfaction” was completely absent from the subject index of
Roethlisberger and Dickson’s (1939) ground breaking work, Management and the
Worker! Indeed, instead of job satisfaction, Roethlisberger and Dickson preferred to
use such terms as “sentiments” and “tone.” These are important conceptual
distinctions because, as appropriately noted by Organ and Near (1985, p. 242), terms
like sentiments (and tone) indicated much more than just satisfaction with one’s job,
but “referred to emotions, to feelings, to affect, to hedonic states.” As one case in point,
an early study by Thorndike (1917) focused, not on job satisfaction, but on a more
global measure of general satisfaction, which Thorndike termed “satisfyingness.” In
sum, a cursory examination of the classic literature in the field clearly demonstrates
how surprisingly infrequently, at least up to the late-1940s, the term “job satisfaction”
actually appeared in the literature (Organ and Near, 1985).
Consider research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP). JAP started
publication in 1917, during World War I. Over the first 30 years of publication, from
1917 to 1946 to be exact, only 2 articles were published in JAP with the words
“job/work satisfaction” in the title. While topics such as Thorndike’s (1917) paper on
satisfyingness were published in JAP early on, the first article focusing on job
 satisfaction was not published until 1937, 20 years after JAP’s inception, by the Historical
pioneering job satisfaction researcher, Robert Hoppock. In this landmark study, analysis
Hoppock (1937) reported job satisfaction levels for a sample of APA vocational and
industrial psychologists, finding that psychologists were no more satisfied than
workers from other occupations.
The second article, by Super (1939), examined the relationship between employee
occupational level and job satisfaction. Super made a number of observations that 267
served as a basis of investigation for future job satisfaction researchers. Among these
observations, Super found differences in average satisfaction level among professional,
managerial and commercial workers, with professional workers reporting being the
most satisfied with their work. Interestingly, it was almost another 10 years, or not
until 1948, that job satisfaction focused articles once again appeared in JAP. For
example, Kerr (1948) reported on the validity and reliability of the job satisfaction tear
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ballot and Nahm (1948) conducted a study on nursing satisfaction. By the early-1950s,
research on job satisfaction was definitely on the rise, and a number of researchers
were publishing their job satisfaction research in JAP, including Kates (1950), Brayfield
and Rothe (1951), and Carey et al. (1951).
Of course, over the next 50 years, literally thousands of articles investigating
aspects of job satisfaction have been published (Locke, 1976; Judge et al., 2001; Spector,
1997). In fact, ask any organizational researcher today what is the most commonly
investigated job attitude, and they will undoubtedly reply: why, job satisfaction, of
course! To help address this mystery of why, this paper proposes that a “missing link”
explanation can be found by jointly considering two independent streams of early,
applied work designed to investigate the correlates of employee efficiency. The first
involves employee susceptibility to various aspects of industrial fatigue and monotony
(Bedale, 1924; Thompson, 1930; Wyatt, 1929). The second examines a long forgotten
body of research on customer sales and advertising (Kitson, 1921; Poffenberger, 1925,
1929; Snow, 1926; Strong, 1925a).

Employee fatigue, monotony and satisfaction

Interest in worker fatigue and monotony can be traced back to the time of scientific
management (Gilbreth and Gilbreth, 1917; Taylor, 1919; Wright, 2005). However, the
topic became even more prominent as a result of the famous Hawthorne experiments at
the Western Electric Company (Mayo, 1933; Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939) and
contemporaneous work in Great Britain by the British Industrial Fatigue and Health
Research Boards (Wyatt, 1924, 1929). For instance, in work that equaled in scientific
rigor the more widely heralded work at the Hawthorne plant, Wyatt (1929) and Wyatt
et al. (1928, 1929) found that when workers experienced monotony or boredom, their
efficiency decreased.
Given these findings, it did not take long for researchers to consider whether
employees differed in their susceptibility to experience monotony or fatigue, especially
given earlier research conducted on army recruits during World War I. Specifically, the
Army Alpha Intelligence Examination administered to military recruits was highly
instrumental in stimulating research on worker propensities to differentially
experience monotony or boredom on the job. Of related interest to applied
researchers, these tests established that scores on intelligence tests varied according
to the previous civilian occupations of the recruits (Blum and Naylor, 1968; Wright,
 JMH 2005). Interestingly, the tests also found that the percentage of illiteracy in the general
12,3 population was surprisingly large, with a significant additional number only able to
read with great difficulty. In particular, fully 25 percent of the military recruits were
unable to read and understand simple printed instructions (Poffenberger, 1929).
Since, the armed forces were being asked to select, process, train, develop, place and
promote literally millions of additional personnel, often in a matter of a few short
268 weeks, these distressing illiteracy results presented military staff with the potential for
a human resources nightmare. As one consequence of the a-tests, a widespread interest
in studying the scope and extent of feeblemindness in society at large and the
workplace in particular developed, as witnessed in Mateer’s (1917) provocatively titled
article in JAP, “The moron as a war problem.”
Further building on these Army Alpha findings, research on worker fatigue and
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monotony focused on the role of employee intelligence in performance prediction

(Wright, 2005). It did not take long for some to recognize the complex nature of a
possible relation between intelligence and performance in the workplace. Miner (1921)
was among the first to recognize that always hiring the most intelligent job candidate
might not be the best strategy, with Otis (1920) noting that an intelligent worker is
more likely to revolt if required to work for a prolonged period of time on repetitious
tasks. Relatedly, and highly pertinent to our discussion on satisfaction, Snow (1923)
noted the possibility that an employee’s intelligence was a prime factor in establishing
his level of general satisfaction. To that end, Snow incorporated Thorndike’s (1917,
1922) aforementioned global measure of (life) satisfaction. Interestingly, for Thorndike
and his students, satisfyingness came to be considered as a primary, fundamental
aspect of human nature. In this context, while duller individuals demonstrated
considerable general dissatisfaction when the work was fairly complex in nature, they
showed the least general dissatisfaction when the work was highly repetitive (Snow,
1923). The lesson learned was that employees widely differed in the extent that they
experienced employee monotony and boredom, which, in turn, affected their
performance.
The implications of these early studies were highly influential on the next
generation of job satisfaction researchers (Rothe, 1946a, b; Smith, 1953). For instance,
one of the leading lights of early applied research on job satisfaction, Patricia Cain
Smith, reported that her early research interest in general satisfactions resulted from
findings of the British Industrial Fatigue and Health Research Boards (Smith, 1992;
Wyatt, 1924, 1929; Wyatt et al., 1929). In an informative look into how applied research
was conducted in the early days, Smith (1992, p. 9) noted that:
First I tried to “validate” workers’ reports of boredom by correlating the reports with slumps
in output. I watched and made complete records of the behavior of each of a number of
machine operators throughout every working day for an entire week.
As a result of her efforts, Smith found that production did, indeed, change and that the
changes were related to the satisfaction of the employee’s self-set goals for the day
(Cain, 1942; Smith, 1953; Wright, 2005). If the employee was behind her self-set goal,
she was likely to be unsatisfied, and would tend to speed up work activity to reduce her
dissatisfaction. Conversely, if the employee was ahead of schedule, she was inclined to
be satisfied and would tend to reduce her work speed or stop work altogether
(Smith, 1953). I suggest that it was observations such as these that greatly helped lead
 to the proposed importance of job satisfaction in the prediction of worker performance. Historical
Next, an examination of the second link in this “missing link” explanation is provided, analysis
the all but forgotten role of customer sales and advertising.

The evolution of customer to job satisfaction

By the 1920s, research on sales and advertising by such prominent writers as Scott
(1908), Sheldon (1911), Hollingworth (1913), Nystrom (1914), Eastman (1916) and 269
Whitehead (1917) was considered by many scholars to be little more than “a jumbled
collection of opinions on a great variety of topics” (Strong, 1925b, p. 77). In fact, while
obviously quite relevant to more modern marketing researchers, the importance of
customer satisfaction was surprisingly absent from the earliest “how to” musings on
appropriate sales techniques (Strong, 1925a, b). The early marketing objective was
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primarily focused on securing the particular sale in question (Wright, 2005).

Poffenberger (1929, p. 411) appropriately referred to this approach “as a kind of combat
in which all plans must be laid so as to guarantee that the distributor shall win and
consumer shall succumb.” As time evolved, this single objective of making a particular
sale became one of not only securing the initial sale, but one of retaining the customer
for future sales (Charters, 1922; Sloan and Mooney, 1920). As a result, this increased
focus and direction regarding just what constitutes a proper sale resulted in the
development of theoretical models devoted to how to influence others to buy (Kitson,
1921; Poffenberger, 1929; Snow, 1926).
One of these early theoretical approaches is especially noteworthy in
acknowledging the importance of customer satisfaction. This approach focused
primarily on the “creation” of customer wants, leading to the increased prominence of
applied psychology-based techniques in sales and advertising (Poffenberger, 1929;
Wright, 2005). Strong (1925b, p. 77) succinctly expressed this approach in terms of the
action sequence “wants-solution-action-satisfaction”(emphasis added). According to
Strong (1925b, p. 85), “we have a picture of selling where the prospect is very active
because he (the customer) has a want to be satisfied and the salesman’s job is to aid the
prospect in his endeavors to solve his problem.” The emphasis became one of what
customer need(s) will the product satisfy. In other words, by the mid-1920s, advertising
had finally evolved to a focus on the wants and desires of the customer. The question of
paramount importance became one of what must be done to enhance customer
happiness and satisfaction with the current product to increase the possibility of
purchasing another product (Wright, 2005).
Simple stuff in the twenty-first century, but quite a revolutionary concept for the
American buying public of the pre-World War I era. After all, the median income for
the 40,000,000 Americans receiving income in 1918 was a very modest $1,140.
Furthermore, 75 percent of the income-earning population received only $1,574 or less,
with the vast majority of that income going to the necessities of food, clothing and
housing (Poffenberger, 1929). Once again, it is important to consider the social
contextual milieu in which this research was being conducted. The role of a heightened
commercialism was rapidly gaining momentum after the World War I (fueled in part
by the post-war rise in income) and sales and advertising philosophy changed
dramatically by the “roaring” 1920s (Wright, 2005). Customer satisfaction had become
extremely important because of the realization that “. . .unless the goods measure up to
expectations there will be no repeat orders” (Scott, 1908, p. 86). This strong influence of
 JMH early sales and advertising research on the role of satisfaction, first for the customer,
12,3 and later for the employee, has not been adequately addressed by organizational
scholars (Wright, 2005). It is very apparent, however, that the emphasis on customer
satisfaction for increasing repeat sales (or increasing performance and productivity)
was not lost on a number of early advertising researchers.
How apparent was this recognition? Well, as noted earlier, only 2 articles with the
270 words “job/work satisfaction” in the title were published from 1917 to 1946 in JAP.
There was a similar apparent lack of interest in job satisfaction research by such other
leading journals as the Personnel Journal. In contrast, over the same time period, an
astonishing 92 articles were published in JAP which had either the root words “sales”
or advertise’ in the article titles, making the knowledge of advertising and sales
methods to the consumer, if not the most studied, certainly the most published JAP
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topics in the 1920s and 1930s. Gradually, this interest in all manner of topics relating to
customer satisfaction with a product evolved, so that by the early-1930s, applied
psychologists were interested in not only whether customer attitudes could distinguish
between successful and unsuccessful products and sales techniques, but also
distinguish between successful and unsuccessful merchants themselves (Waters,
1931). The Great Depression and the subsequent hard economic times of the 1930s,
coupled with the advent of World War II, slowed the inevitable progress. However, it
was only a matter of time before this interest in various aspects of customer and
merchant satisfaction evolved to the study of the satisfaction of actual employees with
aspects of their job, moving Brayfield and Rothe (1951, p. 307) to note that,
“Increasingly, business and industrial concerns are studying the job satisfaction and
morale of the employees.”
Interestingly, a scant four years later, Brayfield and Crockett (1955, p. 42), was
forced to admit that “satisfaction . . . need not imply strong motivation to outstanding
performance.” This skeptical conclusion was further buttressed by Vroom’s (1964)
influential book. In his review, Vroom determined that the median correlation between
job satisfaction and performance was a rather modest r ¼ 0.14. Roughly 20 years later,
a meta-analysis by Iaffaldano and Muchinsky (1985) placed the relation at a similarly
modest r ¼ 0.17. While this seemed to settle the matter, other findings were more
supportive. For instance, at about the same time as Iaffaldano and Muchinsky’s work,
a meta-analysis by Petty et al. (1984) determined that the corrected relation between
satisfaction and performance was actually a rather healthy r ¼ 0.31, over twice the
figure reported by Vroom. Finally, the most comprehensive qualitative and
quantitative analysis of the relation to date was conducted by Judge et al. (2001).
Judge et al.’s meta-analysis was composed of 312 samples with a combined N of
54,417 subjects. Their qualitative review was organized around seven models proposed
as best characterizing past investigations of the job satisfaction – job performance
relation. These models can be briefly summarized as: job satisfaction causes job
performance (model 1); job satisfaction is caused by job performance (model 2); job
satisfaction and job performance are reciprocally related (model 3); job satisfaction is
spuriously related to job performance (model 4); the job satisfaction – job performance
relation is moderated by other variables (model 5); job satisfaction is not related to job
performance (model 6); and finally, that there are alternative conceptualizations of job
satisfaction and/or job performance (model 7). Results of their meta-analysis estimated
the mean true correlation between overall job satisfaction and job performance to be
 0.30, though they observed that the more traditionally-based models 1-4 have typically Historical
provided results that are disappointing to proponents of a job satisfaction – job analysis
performance relation. As a result, recent research has increasingly come to recognize
the importance of models 5 and 7, leading to a renewed optimism about the prospects
of finding practically meaningful relations between job satisfaction and performance
ratings (Cropanzano and Wright, 2001; Judge et al., 1995). Ironically, my review of
classic, but unfortunately, long forgotten, primary research sources uncovered 271
information particularly germane to both models 5 and 7.
A number of applied psychology and management scholars were quite interested
early on in the possible relationships among worker well-being, productivity and
employee retention (Elkind, 1931; Fisher and Hanna, 1931; Hersey, 1929, 1930, 1932a,
b). Unlike job satisfaction, which by definition, is limited in scope to aspects of one’s
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work, these early researchers did not limit the domain of employee well-being to only
the job, but clearly acknowledged the more global elements of well-being, noting that it
refers to one’s life as a whole (Hersey, 1932b). By focusing on positive well-being (and
consistent with Judge et al.’s models 5 and 7), Hersey (1932b, 1929, p. 289) was
sufficiently moved to note that “it would seem impossible to escape the conclusion that
in the long run at least, men are more productive in a positive emotional state than in a
negative [one].”
In like fashion, a number of Hersey’s contemporaries concentrated on the possible
benefits of examining the negative or unpleasantness dimension of well-being (Elkind,
1931; McMurry, 1932). For example, using data obtained from employees at R.H. Macy
and Company, Anderson (1929) concluded that in excess of 20 percent of the working
population suffered from mild mental disorders. In addition, early investigations of this
potential problem were not limited to workers from the USA. According to Culpin and
Smith (1927, 1930), between 20 and 30 percent of gainfully employed British postal
workers suffered from some form of neurosis. In fact, early researchers appeared to
recognize the possibility of both a moderating (Fisher and Hanna, 1931; Hoppock, 1935;
Weitz, 1952) and main effect (Kornhauser and Sharp, 1932; McMurry, 1932) influence of
various measures of employee well-being and emotion on the job satisfaction – job
performance relation.
As with job performance and efficiency, the role of employee well-being in the
prediction of employee attendance and retention has long been of interest to
organizational scholars. Fisher and Hanna’s (1931) seminal work on the “dissatisfied
worker” is representative of this early recognition that employee well-being is
predictive of employee participation decisions. More specifically, they noted that
employee well-being was “responsible to a much greater extent for labor turnover than
is commonly realized”(Fisher and Hanna, 1931, p. 233) and actually accounted for
upwards of 90 percent of employee turnover and 50 percent of absenteeism. Their
interest in the role of employee psychological or emotional well-being in employee
withdrawal decisions was similarly shared by a number of other early researchers,
including Eberle (1919) and Snow (1923). In particular, Eberle (1919) wrote about the
relevance of “general” employee satisfactions, while Snow (1923) focused on the role of
“mental alertness” in employee decisions to withdraw.
These findings clearly demonstrate that a number of early organizational
researchers recognized the possible benefits of employee well-being in better
understanding the happy/productive worker thesis (Wright, 2005). Unfortunately, this
 JMH burgeoning interest in the topic of well-being practically ceased with the advent of the
12,3 great depression (Uhrbrock, 1934), and did not return in the social sciences for roughly
60 years (Diener, 1984, 1994). More recently, an increasing number of scholars are
proposing employee well-being as providing the basis for better understanding and
explaining the happy/productive worker thesis (Wright, 2005; Wright and Cropanzano,
2004).
272
Concluding thoughts
The systematic analysis of employee attitudes began at a rudimentary level, in the
early-1920s (Kornhauser, 1944). Based more on practical, rather than theoretical
grounds, over time, job satisfaction came to be the work attitude of choice for many
researchers interested in studying organizational behaviors (Wright, 2005).
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Incorporating important early, but now mostly forgotten, applied research on

employee boredom, fatigue and customer satisfaction, a “missing link” explanation
was presented for why job satisfaction became the most widely used measure of
happiness in the happy/productive worker thesis. Regarding the first link, much early
interest in job satisfaction evolved from work on the purported relationship between
employee monotony, boredom and fatigue with job performance (Smith, 1953). That is,
and consistent with the practical basis for the Hawthorne experiments (Mayo, 1933;
Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939), if employee satisfaction is related to employee
boredom, and employee boredom is related to performance, perhaps employee job
satisfaction is related to job performance.
The second link evolved from the similar fascination of a number of early, applied
psychologists with maximizing the relationship between customer satisfaction and
future sales performance. According to this argument, if customer satisfaction is
predictive of product sales and subsequent merchant success, then employee
satisfaction with their job should also be predictive of their performance. The
simultaneous consideration of these missing link explanations provides a practical
based explanation for why job satisfaction became the primary operationalization of
happiness. However, given the fact that after literally thousands of studies, a definitive
linkage between job satisfaction and performance remains to be made, future research
endeavors on the happy/productive worker thesis would greatly benefit from a careful
reconsideration of the mostly forgotten stream of early research on worker well-being.

Notes
1. As evidence of this gradual, but slow progression, let us consider the chronology of reference
sources, by decade, listed in Brayfield and Crockett’s (1955) widely cited review of the
employee attitude to employee performance relation. Of the 62 references cited by Brayfield
and Crockett, only four were from the 1920s to 1930s combined! Over half, or 35, were from
the 1950s, with the remaining 23 published in the 1940s.
2. In a review of the term morale, Child (1941, p. 393) noted three different conceptualizations of
the construct. One conceptualization is of particular relevance to the present discussion, as it
refers “to a condition of physical and emotional well-being [italics added] in the individual
that makes it possible for him to work and live hopefully and effectively . . . ” However, as
noted by Organ and Near (1985), as time evolved, the term morale fell more and more into
disfavor, with job satisfaction becoming the job attitude of choice in organizational research.
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Further reading
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Occupational Medicine, Vol. 50, pp. 304-9.
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organizational research”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 14, pp. 385-400.
Fisher, C.D. (1980), “On the dubious wisdom of expecting job satisfaction to correlate with
performance”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 5, pp. 607-12.
Kluger, A.N. and Tikochinsky, J. (2001), “The error of accepting the ‘theoretical’ null hypothesis:
the rise, fall, and resurrection of commonsense hypotheses in psychology”, Psychological
Bulletin, Vol. 127, pp. 408-23.
Ledford, G.E. Jr (1999), “Happiness and productivity revisited”, Journal of Organizational
Behavior, Vol. 20, pp. 25-30.
Organ, D.W. (1988), Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Good Soldier Syndrome, Lexington
Press, Lexington, MA.
Podsakoff, P.M. and Williams, L.J. (1986), “The relationship between individual job satisfaction
and individual performance”, in Locke, E.A. (Ed.), Generalizing from Laboratory to Field
Studies, Lexington Books, Lexington, MA, pp. 207-45.
Roethlisberger, F.J. (1941), Management and Morale, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Staw, B.M. (1986), “Organizational psychology and the pursuit of the happy/productive worker”,
California Management Review, Vol. 28, pp. 40-53.
Vernon, A.M. (1924), “The influence of rest pauses and changes in posture on the capacity of
muscular work”, Report 28, Industrial Fatigue Research Board, London.
Corresponding author
Thomas A. Wright can be contacted at: [email protected]

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