Abstract
The prestigious Journal of Management History is highly commendable for its distinguished role in grounding management thought and accurately attributing theoretical concepts to their original authors. Volume 12, Issue 3 (2006) of this journal featured a significant historical review entitled "The emergence of job satisfaction in organizational behavior: A historical overview of the dawn of job attitudes research" by Thomas A. Wright, a Professor in the Department of Management at the University of Nevada. To begin, it must be emphasized that job satisfaction—a pivotal term in organizational behavior—originated within early 20th-century empirical studies focused on work attitudes, specifically through the efforts of pioneering researchers who examined the correlation between worker attitudes and operational efficiency. The present paper rigorously addresses the existing void in organizational literature resulting from the oversight of the job satisfaction concept during what was considered the "Golden Age" of management theory and practice. Historical evidence suggests that while job satisfaction emerged early on, it was subsequently sidelined as field research pivoted toward customer loyalty, worker boredom, organizational culture, and workplace environment. Although researchers initially focused on work attitudes at the dawn of the 20th century, the 1930s and early 1940s marked a shift toward job satisfaction, which scholars adopted as a widely utilized metric for assessing "happiness" within the "happy/productive worker" research paradigm. Ultimately, the value of this paper lies in its original and comprehensive historical review, providing management and organizational behavior specialists with a nuanced understanding of the evolving fascination with job satisfaction over time.
DOI
10.33095/jeas.v14i50.1389
Subject Area
Managerial
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
First Page
343
Last Page
354
Recommended Citation
Al-Anzi, S. A. (2008). The Emergence of the Concept of Job Satisfaction in Organizational Behavior. Journal of Economics and Administrative Sciences, 14(50), 343-354. https://doi.org/10.33095/jeas.v14i50.1389
