Job Satisfaction Subjective Well - Being at Work

Work is central to most people's identities. When asked a general question, "What do you do"?, most people respond with their job title. Moreover, across many languages, a significant number of people's surnan1es are based on occupations (e.g., in English, just to name a few: abbot, archer, baker, barber, barker, brewer, carpenter, carter, clark, collier, cook, cooper, farmer, fisher, fowler, goldsmith, hooper, mason, miller, porter, roper, sawyer, smith, taylor, thatcher, turner, weaver, wright). Furthermore, more than half of the nonretired adult population spends most of its waking hours at work. Thus, no research on subjective well-being can be complete without considering subjective well-being at work. Beyond their centrality to identities, job attitudes are imponant to consider for other reasons. First, the most widely investigated job attitude-job satisfaction-may be the most extensively researched topic in the history of industrial/ organizational psychology Qudge & Church, 2000}. Second, in the organizational sciences, job satisfaction occupies a central role in many theories and models of individual attitudes and behaviors. Finally, as we note later, job satisfaction research has practical applications for the enhancement of individual lives as well as organizational effectiveness. In this chapter we provide a review of significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the job satisfaction literature, emphasizing several current con-