From Speculation to Substantiation: Empirically-Testing Societal Changes in Impact of Fit on Job Satisfaction from 1989, 1998, 2006, and 2016
利用美国四次大规模人口调查数据，分析员工对工作特征的期望与实际获得之间的匹配度如何影响工作满意度，发现近年来员工对内在奖励性工作特征不足的不满加剧。
Against the backdrop of large-scale changes in work over the past few decades, both business leaders and academics have speculated that employees’ job satisfaction is increasingly tied to the extent to which their jobs meet their desires for meaning and other reinforcers. However, empirical evidence has not yet been brought to bear on these arguments. In order to provide insights into potential socio-temporal changes in how employees derive job satisfaction from job characteristics, we analyzed repeated large-scale population surveys in the United States to examine the impact of fit between desiring and receiving job characteristics on job satisfaction across four time points (1989, 1998, 2006, and 2016). Moderated polynomial regression analyses indicated that employees in more recent years experience greater dissatisfaction by deficiencies in intrinsically-rewarding job characteristics. We interpret these findings against broader discussions of the changing employment narrative theorized to have occurred in the United States over the past several decades.