The employee satisfaction inventory (ESI): development of a scale to measure satisfaction of Greek employees.

The extent to which people are satisfied with their work has been an enduring research interest. An increasing concern with the meaning of work and the belief that the degree of satisfaction at work is related to aspects of work behavior, such as productivity and absenteeism and turnover rates, have prompted the growth of a vast research literature on job satisfaction. Locke (1976, p. 1297), in a comprehensive review, estimated that at the time of his review, some 3,350 articles (or dissertations) relevant to the topic we:re available.

In early studies, job satisfaction was referred to as if it were a single variable. Measurement was generally accomplished by means of instruments designed to give single, overall estimates of the construct (Brayfield & Rothe, 1951; Bullock, 1952; Hackman & Oldham, 1975; Hoppock, 1935; Quinn & Staines, 1979). This is too simplistic, and the current trend is to consider it as a multidimensional construct (Cross, 1973; Heneman & Schwab, 1985; Koustelios, 1991; Rice, McFarlin, & Bennet, 1989; Shouksmith, Pajo, & Jespen, 1990; Smith, Kendall, & Hulin, 1969; Warr & Routledge, 1969).

If we treat job satisfaction as a multidimensional construct, we are faced with the problem of identifying its principal dimensions. Numerous studies have indicated clearly that there are several discriminably different areas of job satisfaction. Measures of these subareas should be relatively independent, and the employees should be able to discriminate among them. Considerable research effort has been devoted to this problem with measures such as the Job Description Index (Smith et al., 1969) and the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (Weiss, Dawis, England, & Lofquist, 1967). Although the exact number and nature of these factors vary considerably from study to study, the findings do consistently support the multidimensional notion.

Although the concept of job satisfaction has been repeatedly analyzed and its major components isolated, some problems regarding the measurement of job satisfaction still exist. Because the vast majority of research in this field has been carried out in the United States, there is a possibility of an American cultural bias. For example, regarding the Job Description Index (JDI), one of the pay items, satisfactory profit sharing, is unlikely to be applicable to the majority of situations in Greek industry. Also, as Cross (1973, p. 194) pointed out, the JDI, although widely used in the United States, has found less favor in Great Britain, and researchers who have employed it there have tended to use their own modified versions of the scale. Additionally, although Takalkar and Coovert's (1994) results support the generalizability to India of the job satisfaction dimensions developed in the United States, the researchers pointed out that the best statistical structure of job satisfaction in India was a modification of Spector's eight-oblique factor model.

The purpose of the present study was to develop a multidimensional scale to measure various aspects of job satisfaction in different organizations and in different occupational groups applicable to the Greek work situation. Factor analysis was employed to determine construct validity based on data derived from two different …