Job in General Scale

1. Abstract

The Job in General Scale (JIG) is an established, psychometrically validated self-report instrument engineered to measure overall, global job satisfaction. Conceptualized and validated by Gail H. Ironson, Patricia C. Smith, Michael T. Brannick, Christina M. Gibson, and Kevin B. Paul in 1989, the JIG was intentionally designed to complement the multidimensional Job Descriptive Index (JDI). While the JDI assesses employee affective and cognitive evaluations across five specific workplace facets (work itself, supervision, pay, promotional opportunities, and coworkers), the JIG operates on the premise that an employee’s holistic evaluation of their employment represents an emergent, gestalt construct that is theoretically and empirically distinct from a simple algebraic summation of facet satisfactions.

Comprising 18 brief verbal descriptors and evaluative adjectives (such as “Pleasant,” “Waste of time,” “Worthwhile,” and “Rotten”), the instrument utilizes the canonical tripartite response architecture (“Yes,” “No,” “?” for undecided) pioneered by Smith, Kendall, and Hulin. Positively valenced items receive 3 points for “Yes,” 1 point for “?,” and 0 points for “No,” whereas negatively valenced items utilize reverse-scoring protocols (Yes = 0, ? = 1, No = 3), yielding a continuous global satisfaction score ranging from 0 to 54. Extensive psychometric evaluations across diverse industrial and organizational sectors consistently demonstrate high internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically spanning from .82 to .94. Furthermore, the instrument exhibits substantial construct, convergent, and discriminant validity, displaying strong positive correlations with affective organizational commitment, managerial trust, and organizational justice perceptions, alongside robust negative relationships with turnover intentions, counterproductive work behaviors, and psychological strain.

2. Keywords

Job in General Scale, JIG, Job Descriptive Index, global job satisfaction, facet satisfaction, affective commitment, organizational psychology, employee attitudes, psychometrics, turnover intentions, workplace well-being, Ironson

3. Authors

The Job in General Scale was developed and standardized by a prominent research consortium at Bowling Green State University and affiliated research institutions:

• Gail H. Ironson, M.D., Ph.D. — Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, Department of Psychology, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, USA. Dr. Ironson specializes in behavioral medicine, industrial-organizational psychology, and the health correlates of chronic workplace and psychological stressors.
• Patricia Cain Smith, Ph.D. (1917–2007) — Professor Emerita of Psychology, Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, USA. Dr. Smith was a foundational pioneer in industrial and organizational psychology, widely celebrated for constructing the original Job Descriptive Index and establishing modern psychometric benchmarks for employee attitude assessment.
• Michael T. Brannick, Ph.D. — Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA. His scholarship centers on organizational research methods, measurement theory, meta-analysis, and job analysis.
• Christina M. Gibson, Ph.D. — Professor of Management and Organization, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California, USA. Her work explores team dynamics, cross-cultural organizational behavior, and employee engagement.
• Kevin B. Paul, Ph.D. — Organizational psychologist and psychometrics consultant who contributed extensively to applied psychometrics and organizational attitude measurement initiatives at Bowling Green State University.

4. Purpose

The principal purpose of the Job in General Scale (JIG) is to quantify an individual employee’s universal, overarching evaluation of their employment experience, capturing global job satisfaction as an autonomous psychometric entity. Prior to the formal introduction of the JIG by Ironson and colleagues in 1989, organizational researchers routinely relied upon composite facet scores (such as summing the subscales of the Job Descriptive Index) or single-item indicators (such as asking “How satisfied are you with your job as a whole?”) to estimate holistic workplace morale. However, these antecedent approaches presented substantial psychometric and conceptual limitations.

From an applied perspective, the JIG addresses the fundamental reality that individual employees do not cognitively process their workplace satisfaction as a sterile linear compilation of separate workplace features. When employees reflect on facet-level queries (e.g., assessing specific administrative behaviors of their immediate supervisor or the monetary calibration of their salary), they access localized, descriptive-cognitive frames of reference. In contrast, when confronted with macro-level existential life decisions—such as deciding whether to resign, accept a transfer, engage in organizational citizenship behaviors, or endure an arduous commute—employees invoke a global affective-cognitive frame of reference. The JIG was purposefully constructed to measure this overarching gestalt directly, cleanly isolating it from facet-specific variance.

In academic and field research, the JIG serves several vital diagnostic and empirical functions:

• Predicting Broad Organizational Outcomes: In alignment with the compatibility principle in attitude theory (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1977), general attitudes predict general behavioral patterns far better than specific facet attitudes do. The JIG excels at forecasting broad, distal organizational criteria, including voluntary turnover, sustained retention, generalized organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), and organizational commitment.
• Facilitating Comparative Organizational Benchmarking: Because the JIG employs context-neutral evaluative adjectives rather than job-specific technical terminology, it can be seamlessly administered across disparate professional sectors, occupational hierarchies, and demographic strata, providing standardized normative profiles.
• Diagnostic Discrepancy Analysis: When administered concurrently with the five facet scales of the JDI, the JIG enables human resource practitioners and organizational consultants to identify profound diagnostic discrepancies. For example, a workforce may report high satisfaction with pay, supervision, and coworkers on the JDI, yet score markedly low on the JIG—a red flag indicating that unmeasured systemic variables (such as corporate culture, ethical misalignment, job insecurity, or lack of intrinsic task significance) are suppressing overall organizational morale.
• Mitigating Common Method Bias and Cognitive Fatigue: Consisting of only 18 succinct words or brief phrases, the JIG requires less than three minutes to administer. Its efficiency dramatically minimizes participant cognitive burden and fatigue in enterprise-wide pulse surveys, multi-wave longitudinal studies, and intensive ecological momentary assessment (EMA) research designs.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the Job in General Scale is global job satisfaction. Within organizational psychology, job satisfaction is formally conceptualized as an evaluative state expressing the degree of positive or negative affect, cognitive appraisal, and psychological attachment an individual experiences toward their work role (Locke, 1976; Spector, 1997).

Global Satisfaction Versus Composite Facet Satisfaction

A critical theoretical distinction highlighted by Ironson et al. (1989) is the structural divergence between global job satisfaction and composite facet satisfaction. Composite satisfaction treats overall morale as an additive or multiplicative function of discrete components: satisfaction with work itself, pay, promotion, supervision, and coworkers. While intuitive, composite measurement suffers from three primary psychometric limitations:

1. Unmeasured Facets: An additive model assumes that all critical dimensions of work have been captured. If an organization’s specific stressors reside in environmental safety, bureaucratic red tape, physical ergonomics, or values congruence, an aggregated facet scale will inevitably misrepresent the employee’s genuine morale.
2. Differential Idiosyncratic Weighting: Employees assign markedly divergent cognitive weights to different workplace attributes. For a young professional prioritizing career progression, promotional opportunities might represent 60% of their psychological appraisal, whereas an employee approaching retirement might weight health benefits and stability above all else. Aggregating standardized facet subscales with fixed equal weights distorts individual cognitive processing.
3. Gestalt Phenomenon: Consistent with Gestalt psychology, the totality of an employee’s occupational experience is inherently distinct from the sum of its isolated parts. An individual may experience moderate dissatisfaction with salary and daily paperwork, yet nonetheless feel passionately enriched by their overarching profession and institutional mission.

The JIG explicitly targets this macro-level holistic construct. Rather than inquiring into specific behavioral mechanics or transactional exchanges, the scale captures an intuitive, overarching appraisal of occupational life.

Affective and Cognitive Valence in the 18 Items

The 18 items of the JIG span both affective sentiments (emotional feeling states) and cognitive appraisals (evaluative judgments of worth and utility):

• Positive Evaluative Indicators: Items such as “Pleasant,” “Enjoyable,” and “Makes me content” capture warm, hedonic affective states derived from day-to-day work tasks. Items such as “Great,” “Good,” “Worthwhile,” “Superior,” “Better than most,” “Acceptable,” and “Excellent” capture comparative cognitive appraisals regarding quality, dignity, and career utility.
• Negative Evaluative Indicators (Reverse-Scored): Items such as “Bad,” “Waste of time,” “Undesirable,” “Worse than most,” “Disagreeable,” “Inadequate,” “Rotten,” and “Poor” detect subjective feelings of occupational distress, futility, and structural dissatisfaction. Their inclusion balances acquiescence response bias and ensures robust measurement precision across the negative pole of the affective continuum.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Job in General Scale is anchored in several prominent theoretical frameworks within psychometrics, cognitive appraisal theory, and organizational behavior:

The Principle of Compatibility and Attitudinal Symmetry

Developed by Ajzen and Fishbein (1977), the principle of compatibility posits that attitudes and behaviors must be calibrated at equivalent levels of specificity to yield meaningful predictive relationships. A specific attitude (e.g., satisfaction with the transparency of the annual bonus algorithm) reliably predicts a specific behavior (e.g., attending an administrative compensation meeting). However, specific facet attitudes demonstrate weaker and inconsistent predictive utility when forecasting broad, aggregate workplace behaviors (such as overall citizenship, burnout, or voluntary quitting). Ironson et al. (1989) formulated the JIG specifically to provide an attitudinal metric possessing high generalizability, aligning symmetric broad-criterion prediction with broad-attitude measurement.

Cognitive Appraisal and Affective Events Theory

Under Lazarus’s (1991) cognitive appraisal theory and Weiss and Cropanzano’s (1996) Affective Events Theory (AET), an employee’s evaluation of their work environment represents a continuous interplay between immediate emotional reactions to transient work occurrences and sustained cognitive reflections. The JIG taps into long-term cognitive synthesis. When presented with brief descriptors such as “Worthwhile” or “Waste of time,” individuals rapidly integrate chronic affective histories, perceived organizational support, and self-concordance into a consolidated cognitive judgment.

Smith, Kendall, and Hulin’s Descriptive Item Methodology

The foundational measurement philosophy underpinning the JIG originates directly from the seminal work of Smith, Kendall, and Hulin (1969) during the creation of the Job Descriptive Index. Smith and colleagues argued that traditional Likert-type scales (e.g., “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree”) introduce substantial cognitive noise because they force respondents to process both the semantic content of the statement and an artificial rating scale metric simultaneously. Moreover, Likert scales tend to elicit defensive, socially desirable responses or middle-category evasiveness.

In contrast, Smith’s paradigm utilizes brief, unambiguous adjectives and descriptors combined with a simple tripartite decision format (“Yes,” “No,” “?”). This architecture functions like an implicit associative network task. Respondents rapidly evaluate whether the semantic node (e.g., “Enjoyable”) fits their mental prototype of their current employment situation. This minimizes verbal processing load and yields exceptionally high reliability across varying educational, socio-economic, and reading literacy levels.

7. Validity

The Job in General Scale has undergone exhaustive empirical scrutiny, demonstrating exemplary construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity across dozens of independent organizational studies and diverse demographic samples.

Convergent and Construct Validity

In their initial validation study, Ironson et al. (1989) compared the JIG against several established measures of job satisfaction, including the Brayfield-Rothe Scale, the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ), the Kunin Faces Scale, and composite aggregations of the Job Descriptive Index facets. The JIG correlated strongly with alternative global measures (correlations typically between .65 and .80), establishing high convergent validity. Concurrently, it demonstrated that while it correlated moderately to strongly with the five JDI facets (ranging from .40 for pay to .70 for work itself), it accounted for unique variance when predicting key occupational outcomes, confirming that global satisfaction captures psychological space beyond that mapped by facet composites.

Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

The JIG demonstrates robust predictive power across a broad spectrum of critical organizational, psychological, and physiological criteria:

• Voluntary Employee Turnover and Turnover Intentions: Research by Crapanzano, James, and Konovsky (1993), as well as Major, Kozlowski, Chao, and Gardner (1995), revealed that global job satisfaction measured via the JIG serves as one of the most potent negative predictors of voluntary turnover intentions and actual subsequent resignation behavior. Global assessments consistently outperform individual facet measures in forecasting organizational attrition.
• Affective Organizational Commitment and Trust: Konovsky and Crapanzano (1991), along with Long (1993), documented pronounced positive associations between JIG scores and affective organizational commitment, psychological attachment to institutional objectives, and trust in senior leadership. Employees reporting elevated JIG scores consistently demonstrate greater discretionary effort and loyalty.
• Perceptions of Organizational Justice: Studies investigating procedural, distributive, and interactional fairness (Crapanzano et al., 1993) confirm that JIG scores correlate positively with employee judgments regarding fair decision-making processes and equitable resource allocations.
• Occupational Health and Well-Being: Wanberg (1995) and Rowley, Rosse, and Harvey (1992) established that the JIG exhibits negative relationships with somatic complaints, job burnout, emotional exhaustion, and psychological distress, underscoring its utility as an indicator of general occupational well-being.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity has been demonstrated through structural equation modeling and multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analyses. The JIG cleanly differentiates between global job satisfaction and adjacent constructs such as generalized positive affectivity (trait PA), general life satisfaction, generalized self-efficacy, and career tenure with a supervisor (Major et al., 1995). Although an employee’s life satisfaction and job satisfaction are naturally correlated (the “spillover effect”), confirmatory factor analyses show that items from the JIG do not cross-load onto non-work subjective well-being factors.

8. Reliability

The Job in General Scale exhibits exemplary psychometric reliability across internal consistency, alternate-form stability, and test-retest investigations.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the original scale development and validation sample by Ironson et al. (1989), which encompassed diverse professional classifications (ranging from managerial personnel to manufacturing operatives), the 18-item JIG demonstrated a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .91 to .95. Subsequent independent empirical replications across diverse industry sectors have consistently confirmed this high internal consistency:

• Konovsky & Crapanzano (1991): Reported a coefficient alpha of .91 in an examination of organizational citizenship and procedural justice among hospital employees.
• Rowley, Rosse, & Harvey (1992): Documented an alpha coefficient of .92 in an applied healthcare and administrative setting.
• Long (1993): Found an internal consistency alpha of .94 in a comprehensive study of managerial trust and institutional attitudes.
• Major, Kozlowski, Chao, & Gardner (1995): Obtained a coefficient alpha of .89 to .92 across longitudinal waves evaluating organizational socialization and newcomer adaptation.
• Wanberg (1995): Observed an internal consistency alpha of .88 among displaced workers undergoing transition into novel occupational environments.

Across published literature, internal consistency reliability coefficients routinely exceed the conventional .80 benchmark for research instruments and meet or exceed the rigorous .90 threshold recommended by psychometricians for individual-level diagnostic and organizational decision-making.

Test-Retest and Temporal Stability

Investigations evaluating the temporal stability of the JIG indicate high test-retest reliability across short-to-medium measurement intervals. Test-retest reliability coefficients over a 2- to 4-week window typically hover between r = .80 and .87, reflecting that global job satisfaction constitutes a relatively stable cognitive attitude while still demonstrating sufficient sensitivity to detect genuine changes in employment circumstances, organizational restructuring, or psychological contracts.

9. Factor Analysis

Extensive factor analytic investigations utilizing both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) substantiate the theoretical unidimensionality of the Job in General Scale.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During scale construction, Ironson et al. (1989) subjected an initial pool of candidate items to principal components analysis (PCA) and principal axis factoring with both orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations. Scree plots and eigenvalue criteria (Kaiser-Guttman rule, eigenvalue > 1.0) consistently pointed to a dominant, single general factor accounting for the vast majority of the common variance (frequently exceeding 45–55% of the total variance before rotation). Factor loadings for the 18 retained items uniformly exceeded .50, with core evaluative descriptors such as “Good,” “Enjoyable,” “Worthwhile,” and “Undesirable” displaying primary loadings spanning from .65 to .85.

Although some unrotated factor solutions identified a secondary method factor reflecting item valence (positively worded items clustering slightly apart from negatively worded items), subsequent analyses revealed that this artifactual split was driven by wording directionality rather than substantively meaningful psychological sub-constructs. When method variance is statistically controlled, the items collapse unequivocally into a single overarching global satisfaction continuum.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Model Fit

Contemporary psychometric evaluations employing Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis have evaluated several competing structural models for the JIG:

• Single-Factor Global Model: Specifies all 18 items loading directly onto a single latent construct of global job satisfaction.
• Two-Factor Valence Model: Specifies positive items loading onto a “Favorable Experience” factor and reverse-scored items loading onto an “Unfavorable Experience” factor.
• Bifactor Model (General Factor + Method Factors): Specifies a single substantive general factor accounting for common variance across all 18 items, alongside two orthogonal method factors capturing shared variance due to positive and negative phrasing.

Across multiple published studies (e.g., Balzer et al., 1997; Russell et al., 2004), the single-factor model with correlated errors among similarly valenced items, or a formal bifactor specification, yields superior fit indices:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Routinely exceeds .93 to .97, signifying robust model calibration.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Typically spans between .92 and .96.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Consistently maintains values between .042 and .065, falling cleanly within the recognized thresholds for close model fit.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Generally falls below .050.

These empirical findings confirm that the 18 items function harmoniously to measure an integrated, unidimensional construct, justifying the calculation of a single composite score.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Job in General Scale (JIG)
• Acronym: JIG
• Authors: Gail H. Ironson, Patricia Cain Smith, Michael T. Brannick, Christina M. Gibson, and Kevin B. Paul (1989)
• Construct Assessed: Global Job Satisfaction
• Test Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or digital questionnaire; suitable for individual or large-scale enterprise administration
• Number of Items: 18 evaluative adjectives and short descriptive phrases
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 3 minutes
• Target Population: Working adults across all occupational sectors, organizational levels, and industries
• Response Scale Architecture: Canonical tripartite response format:
  • Y: “Yes” — if the item describes your job in general
  • N: “No” — if the item does not describe your job in general
  • ?: “?” — if you cannot decide or are undecided
• Scoring and Item Valencing Rules:
  • Positively Phrased Items (10 items): Pleasant, Great, Good, Worthwhile, Acceptable, Superior, Better than most, Makes me content, Excellent, Enjoyable.
    Scoring: Y = 3 points, ? = 1 point, N = 0 points.
  • Negatively Phrased / Reverse-Scored Items (8 items): Bad, Waste of time, Undesirable, Worse than most, Disagreeable, Inadequate, Rotten, Poor.
    Scoring: Y = 0 points, ? = 1 point, N = 3 points.
  • Note on the “?” category: Awarding 1 point for “?” reflects empirical evidence developed by the Bowling Green research group indicating that an undecided response signifies a slight balance toward dissatisfaction relative to an unambiguous “Yes.”
  • Total Score Range: 0 to 54 points. Higher aggregated scores reflect higher levels of global job satisfaction.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Job in General Scale was officially published in 1989 in the Journal of Applied Psychology (American Psychological Association). The scale items and psychometric benchmarks were developed through the research program at Bowling Green State University (BGSU).

• Copyright & Custodianship: The original publication is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association (APA, 1989). Continued normative management, licensing, and standardized benchmark databases for the JDI and JIG are maintained by the Job Descriptive Index Office within the Department of Psychology at Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio.
• Academic and Non-Commercial Research Use: The scale is widely accessible for academic research, non-commercial dissertations, and scholarly inquiries. BGSU typically permits educational and student research use under specific fair-use or low-cost research agreements upon formal registration with the JDI Office.
• Commercial and Organizational Consulting Use: Commercial organizations, corporate human resource departments, and independent consulting firms seeking to utilize the JIG for corporate diagnostics, workforce benchmarking, or organizational development initiatives are required to license the instrument and purchase official scoring manuals/norm tables through the BGSU JDI Office.
• Original Publication Year: 1989.

12. References

• Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1977). Attitude-behavior relations: A theoretical analysis and review of empirical research. Psychological Bulletin, 84(5), 888–918. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.84.5.888
• Balzer, W. K., Kihm, J. A., Smith, P. C., Irwin, J. L., Bachiochi, P. D., Robie, C., Sinar, E. F., & Parra, L. F. (1997). Users’ manual for the Job Descriptive Index (JDI; 1997 Revision) and the Job in General (JIG) scales. Bowling Green State University.
• Crapanzano, R., James, K., & Konovsky, M. A. (1993). Dispositional affectivity as a predictor of work attitudes and job performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 14(6), 595–606. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030140607
• Ironson, G. H., Smith, P. C., Brannick, M. T., Gibson, C. M., & Paul, K. B. (1989). Construction of a Job in General Scale: A comparison of global, composite, and specific measures. Journal of Applied Psychology, 74(2), 193–200. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.74.2.193
• Konovsky, M. A., & Crapanzano, R. (1991). Perceptions of procedural justice in determine employees’ reactions to a corporate layoff. Journal of Applied Psychology, 76(5), 698–707. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.76.5.698
• Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. Oxford University Press.
• Locke, E. A. (1976). The nature and causes of job satisfaction. In M. D. Dunnette (Ed.), Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (pp. 1297–1349). Rand McNally.
• Long, P. G. (1993). The impact of trust in management on employee attitudes and contextual performance. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University.
• Major, D. A., Kozlowski, S. W., Chao, G. T., & Gardner, P. D. (1995). A longitudinal investigation of newcomer expectations, early socialization outcomes, and the moderating effects of role development factors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 80(3), 418–431. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.80.3.418
• Rowley, C. A., Rosse, J. G., & Harvey, R. J. (1992). The psychometric equivalence of global and facet satisfaction indices. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Montreal, Canada.
• Russell, S. S., Spitzmüller, C., Lin, L. F., Stanton, J. M., Smith, P. C., & Ironson, G. H. (2004). Shorter can also be better: The abridged Job Descriptive Index (aJDI) and abridged Job in General (aJIG) scales. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 65(3), 378–399. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2003.08.003
• Smith, P. C., Kendall, L. M., & Hulin, C. L. (1969). The measurement of satisfaction in work and retirement: A strategy for the study of attitudes. Rand McNally.
• Spector, P. E. (1997). Job satisfaction: Application, assessment, causes, and consequences. SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452231549
• Wanberg, C. R. (1995). A longitudinal investigation of the effects of unemployment and underemployment on mental health and reemployment success. Journal of Applied Psychology, 80(2), 268–281. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.80.2.268
• Weiss, H. M., & Cropanzano, R. (1996). Affective events theory: A theoretical discussion of the structure, causes and consequences of affective experiences at work. Research in Organizational Behavior, 18, 1–74.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)