Job satisfaction is as elusive as any other kind of contentment. Even given the choice, people are notoriously bad at predicting what will make them happy, a state of mind that is probably more a byproduct of internal and external conditions than a directly attainable goal. Yet psychologists persist in trying to tease apart the factors that happiness at work consistently contains.
For some, Abraham Maslow's seminal 'hierarchy of needs' accounts for employees' changing demands at work. The uneducated and powerless are content when work offers them the minimum of security, food and shelter. But once satisfied, these criteria lose their potency. Successful employers then need to foster contexts in which employees can satisfy their desire for meaningful social interaction.
Worker satisfaction increasingly depends on the right feedback and rewards that will promote a feeling of self-worth. Finally, people will be happy with nothing short of what Maslow calls 'self-actualisation', a luxurious state in which a person is able to act and think at work according to his or her own highest instincts and abilities. Typically, at this stage, the border between work and life becomes fuzzy.
This is when one is most likely to experience what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls 'flow'. Flow is having or being able to create situations in which one can become completely immersed in what one is doing.
Individual difference at work was the focus of a recent report published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Applied Psychology. The study examined the popular 'Big Five' model of personality, which measures traits that are relatively stable over a lifetime and which, broadly speaking, remain valid across cultures. They are extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and agreeableness.
Extroversion had by far the most robust association with happiness at work. Extroverts appear to instinctively put themselves into situations that foster positive feelings.