Pay
What job satisfaction is, in short
Job satisfaction is how positively you feel about your job overall and about its parts: pay, growth, your manager, your colleagues, the work itself and your workload. People are often happy with some parts and unhappy with others, so the parts are more useful to know than the overall feeling.
Weighting by importance matters too. Low satisfaction with something you don't care about is no problem; low satisfaction with something you care about most is where to act. The statements are our own and the scores aren't normed.
By What's Your IQ · Reviewed 4 Oct 2026- Format
- 18 statements (3 per area), 6 importance ratings, 1 overall question
- Scoring
- 3–15 per area; 6 statements reverse-scored
- Result
- Importance × satisfaction map with four action groups
- Best used for
- Preparing for a one-to-one, review or job search
Fixing what annoys you isn't the same as adding what motivates you
Frederick Herzberg argued that some parts of a job only cause unhappiness when they're missing, while others actively motivate. Later research found the split isn't clean, but the distinction still helps when deciding what to ask for.
- Herzberg, F., Mausner, B., & Snyderman, B. B. (1959). The motivation to work. Wiley.
- Judge, T. A., Thoresen, C. J., Bono, J. E., & Patton, G. K. (2001). The job satisfaction–job performance relationship: A qualitative and quantitative review. Psychological Bulletin, 127(3), 376–407.
- Wanous, J. P., Reichers, A. E., & Hudy, M. J. (1997). Overall job satisfaction: How good are single-item measures? Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(2), 247–252.
- Judge, T. A., Piccolo, R. F., Podsakoff, N. P., Shaw, J. C., & Rich, B. L. (2010). The relationship between pay and job satisfaction: A meta-analysis of the literature. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 77(2), 157–167.