A STUDY OF THE IMPACT OF FACTOR IMPORTANCE WEIGHTINGS ON JOB-SATISFACTION MEASURES

This study empirically tests Locke's theory that the importance of a j ob satisfaction factor to an individual is already reflected in the in dividual's responses to the specific questions, Responses from a job s atisfaction survey carried out by a large Canadian company were analyz ed using a second generation causal modeling technique, Partial Least Squares. The results supported Locke's theory in that weighting the re sponses with the individual's importance factors did not improve the v ariance explained in the job satisfaction model. Further analysis indi cated that there were differences between groups with high job satisfa ction and groups with low satisfaction, differences in job satisfactio n for different levels of service length, and that the differences in job satisfaction across gender were not large.