Satisfaction With Job Facets

Abstract

The Satisfaction With Job Facets measure, originally conceptualized by Frank M. Andrews and Stephen B. Withey (1976) as part of their seminal social indicators research and later psychometrically refined within industrial and organizational psychology by Joan R. Rentsch and Robert P. Steel (1992), is a concise, five-item instrument designed to assess an employee’s evaluation of core employment dimensions and overarching job satisfaction. Unlike traditional multi-item inventory batteries such as the Job Descriptive Index (JDI) or the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ), which often require substantial administration time, the Andrews and Withey instrument provides a parsimonious assessment that balances facet-level breadth with general evaluative depth. The scale measures five distinct facets: global job evaluation, co-worker relations, the nature of the work itself, physical working conditions and workload, and resource availability alongside supervisory support. A defining characteristic of this instrument is its response format: an authentic 7-point Likert-type Delighted–Terrible continuum ranging from 1 (“Terrible”) to 7 (“Delighted”). Across empirical validation studies in military, public sector, and corporate environments, the scale demonstrates robust internal consistency reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients consistently falling between .79 and .81. Structural equation modeling and construct validation establish strong convergent validity with established benchmarks (JDI, MSQ), significant positive associations with organizational commitment and performance ratings, and pronounced negative associations with turnover intention. This article provides a comprehensive academic overview of the scale’s historical origin, psychological construct, theoretical grounding, psychometric properties, factor structure, scoring procedures, and complete authentic questionnaire items.

Keywords

Satisfaction With Job Facets, Andrews and Withey, Job Satisfaction, Delighted-Terrible Scale, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Psychometrics, Convergent Validity, Job Descriptive Index, Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire, Employee Well-Being

Authors

The Satisfaction With Job Facets measure emerged through the collaborative scholarship of social indicators researchers and organizational psychologists over several decades:

• Frank M. Andrews, Ph.D. (Deceased) — Institute for Social Research (ISR) and Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Dr. Andrews was an internationally recognized pioneer in subjective well-being measurement, survey methodology, and quality-of-life indicators.
• Stephen B. Withey, Ph.D. (Deceased) — Institute for Social Research (ISR) and Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Dr. Withey was an influential scholar in public communication, social perception, and the operationalization of life quality domains.
• Joan R. Rentsch, Ph.D. — Department of Management and School of Communication Studies, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. Dr. Rentsch conducted extensive construct and concurrent psychometric validation of the instrument within modern organizational settings.
• Robert P. Steel, Ph.D. — Department of Management, College of Business Administration, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, United States (formerly with the Air Force Institute of Technology). Dr. Steel has contributed extensively to absenteeism modeling, turnover etiology, and organizational survey methodologies.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Satisfaction With Job Facets scale is to deliver an economically structured, psychometrically sound appraisal of an individual’s affective and cognitive evaluations regarding critical components of their employment. In both applied organizational contexts and large-scale academic research, investigators frequently confront a methodological trade-off between the depth of exhaustive facet inventories and the practical necessity of brief survey protocols. Comprehensive instruments such as the 72-item Job Descriptive Index (Smith, Kendall, & Hulin, 1969) or the 100-item Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (Weiss, Dawis, England, & Lofquist, 1967) offer extensive diagnostic mapping across multiple occupational axes. However, their sheer length can induce survey fatigue, lower response rates, and restrict the inclusion of concurrent psychological batteries in longitudinal or field-based research designs.

The Andrews and Withey operationalization resolves this dilemma by distilling the multidimensional domain of job satisfaction into five representative anchor facets. Rather than measuring satisfaction solely as an abstract, global psychological state or through an overwhelming checklist of minute daily tasks, this scale directs the respondent to evaluate fundamental occupational pillars: the overarching job gestalt, collegial interpersonal relations, the core tasks of the work itself, the physical environment and structural workload, and the adequacy of supportive resources and immediate supervision. By capturing these pivotal domains via high-order evaluative prompts, the instrument functions effectively as both an aggregate index of occupational contentment and a multidimensional screening tool capable of identifying specific occupational stressors or structural deficits within an organization’s climate.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the Satisfaction With Job Facets scale is composite job satisfaction, operationalized through five foundational, interconnected occupational domains. Job satisfaction is defined within organizational psychometrics as an evaluative state representing an affective, cognitive, and behavioral orientation toward one’s vocational responsibilities and working environment (Locke, 1976). Rather than treating job satisfaction as an undifferentiated emotional reaction, this scale conceptualizes it as a cognitive appraisal informed by concrete working conditions across five specific facets:

1. Global Evaluation of the Job

The first item prompts respondents to assess their job as an integrated entity (“How do you feel about your job?”). This dimension captures the respondent’s holistic, overarching cognitive appraisal. It accounts for emergent psychological values—such as perceived prestige, organizational identification, and macroeconomic value—that may transcend the simple linear summation of isolated workplace components.

2. Social and Interpersonal Facet (Co-workers)

The second item addresses the interpersonal and relational architecture of the workplace (“How do you feel about the people you work with-your co-workers?”). This facet assesses the quality of social capital, psychological safety, collegiality, mutual assistance, and interpersonal synergy among peers. Theoretical literature confirms that social integration with co-workers serves as an indispensable buffer against job burnout and emotional exhaustion (House, 1981).

3. The Work Itself (Intrinsic Task Characteristics)

The third item isolates the respondent’s feelings concerning task characteristics and intrinsic job features (“How do you feel about the work you do on your job-the work itself?”). Rooted firmly in Job Characteristics Theory (Hackman & Oldham, 1976), this dimension focuses on skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and intrinsic task engagement, delineating between mere transactional employment and psychologically meaningful work.

4. Environmental Surroundings and Workload

The fourth item examines physical ergonomics, temporal arrangements, and quantitative workload demands (“What is it like where your work-the physical surroundings, the hours, the amount of work you are asked to do?”). This facet evaluates the hygiene and extrinsic parameters of employment as detailed in classical motivational frameworks, including the adequacy of environmental conditions (lighting, temperature, space), working schedules, shift structures, and perceived workload expectations.

5. Organizational Resources and Supervisory Enablement

The fifth item appraises structural and technical support systems necessary for competent task execution (“How do you feel about what you have available for doing your job—I mean the equipment, information, good supervision, and so on?”). This facet measures instrumentalities: the technical tooling, organizational communication channels, informational clarity, and administrative guidance supplied by leadership, which determine an employee’s situational capacity to achieve professional self-efficacy.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Satisfaction With Job Facets measure is situated at the intersection of subjective well-being research and classical organizational behavior theory. Its conceptual formulation draws principally from three distinct paradigms:

Social Indicators and Life Domain Quality Framework

Originally formulated by Frank M. Andrews and Stephen B. Withey (1976) in their foundational work Social Indicators of Well-Being: Americans’ Perceptions of Life Quality, the instrument was conceptualized within a broader structural model of perceptual social indicators. Andrews and Withey argued that global life satisfaction is formed by an additive or compensatory synthesis of cognitive-affective appraisals across discrete life domains (e.g., family, health, community, and occupation). In their structural modeling, the occupational domain emerged as one of the most powerful predictors of global subjective well-being.

Crucially, Andrews and Withey pioneered the Delighted–Terrible scale to capture these appraisals. Their psychometric investigations demonstrated that standard satisfaction scales (e.g., “Very Satisfied” to “Very Dissatisfied”) often suffered from severe ceiling effects and positive response bias because social desirability and psychological coping mechanisms prompt individuals to state they are “satisfied” with substandard conditions. By anchoring the extremes with intense emotional-cognitive descriptors (“Delighted” vs. “Terrible”) and providing distinct middle categories (“Pleased”, “Mostly satisfied”, “Mixed”, “Mostly dissatisfied”, “Unhappy”), the scale expands the affective variance captured, establishing higher discriminative capability across respondent cohorts.

Locke’s Value-Percept Theory

The scale aligns closely with Edwin A. Locke’s (1976) Value-Percept Theory of job satisfaction. Locke posited that job satisfaction is an affective state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job as achieving or facilitating the achievement of one’s occupational values. According to Locke, job satisfaction is determined by a cognitive discrepancy computation: the gap between what an individual desires from an environment (their value hierarchy) and what they perceive themselves as receiving. The five items of the Andrews and Withey scale prompt respondents to perform this exact cognitive-affective calculus across core value domains: task meaning, interpersonal relationships, external hygiene/workload, and supportive resource enablement.

Herzberg’s Two-Factor Motivator-Hygiene Theory

The balanced selection of items within the five-item structure reflects the core tenets of Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory (Herzberg, Mausner, & Snyderman, 1959). Item 3 (“the work itself”) captures intrinsic motivators (growth, intrinsic interest, self-realization), whereas Item 4 (physical surroundings, hours, workload) and Item 5 (equipment, supervision) directly assess extrinsic hygiene factors. By concurrently tracking both motivator and hygiene elements, the instrument avoids biasing the measurement model toward either purely intrinsic emotional states or purely extrinsic physical working arrangements.

Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations have established the construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity of the Satisfaction With Job Facets measure across diverse samples, including civilian workforces, aerospace maintenance personnel, healthcare staff, and military employees.

Convergent and Concurrent Validity

In their definitive validation study, Rentsch and Steel (1992) examined the convergent validity of the Andrews and Withey measure against established psychometric gold standards. In a structural sample of United States Air Force civil service employees ($N = 205$), the Andrews and Withey scale correlated highly with the overall satisfaction indices of both the Job Descriptive Index ($r = .70, p < .001$) and the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire ($r = .71, p < .001$).

Furthermore, when mapped against the five specific subdimensions of the JDI, the Andrews and Withey measure exhibited statistically significant positive correlations with all five facets:

• Satisfaction with the Work Itself: $r = .65, p < .001$
• Satisfaction with Supervision: $r = .55, p < .001$
• Satisfaction with Co-workers: $r = .47, p < .001$
• Satisfaction with Promotion Opportunities: $r = .45, p < .001$
• Satisfaction with Pay: $r = .38, p < .001$

Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

Criterion validity has been substantiated through observed correlations with organizational outcomes, objective behavioral markers, and performance metrics:

• Turnover Intentions: Research by Steel and Rentsch (1995, 1997) and McFarlin and Rice (1992) consistently demonstrated strong negative associations between the Andrews and Withey score and employees’ intention to quit ($r$ values ranging from $-.45$ to $-.58$), confirming that lower facet satisfaction is an immediate antecedent of voluntary separation cognitions.
• Organizational Commitment: The measure exhibits substantial positive correlations with affective and normative organizational commitment ($r = .52$ to $.61$), reflecting that satisfaction with job facets fosters deeper psychological attachment to the employing institution.
• Workplace Performance: The instrument is positively associated with both self-rated job performance ($r = .24, p < .01$) and supervisory-rated performance ($r = .18, p < .05$), as well as documented promotion opportunities and actual pay level (McFarlin & Rice, 1992).
• Job Characteristics and Autonomy: Significant positive correlations exist between the measure and perceived freedom to execute work autonomously, amount of participative decision-making, learning opportunities, customer/client contact frequency, and positive developmental conversations with one’s supervisor (Rentsch & Steel, 1992; Steel & Rentsch, 1995).

Reliability

Despite its conciseness, the Satisfaction With Job Facets scale demonstrates strong internal consistency reliability across varied employee samples and time horizons:

Internal Consistency

Published empirical studies consistently document Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) coefficients at or near the .80 benchmark, demonstrating optimal internal coherence without excessive item redundancy:

• Rentsch & Steel (1992): Reported an internal consistency coefficient of $lpha = .81$ in a primary validation cohort of federal civil service personnel.
• McFarlin & Rice (1992): Observed a Cronbach’s alpha of $lpha = .79$ across a broad occupational cross-section, demonstrating robustness against industry variation.
• Steel & Rentsch (1995): Obtained an alpha coefficient of $lpha = .80$ in a longitudinal field study assessing occupational antecedents of employee behavior.
• Steel & Rentsch (1997): Demonstrated an alpha of $lpha = .80$ in subsequent predictive structural modeling analyses.

Average inter-item correlations typically fall within the desirable range of $.40$ to $.55$, satisfying standard psychometric requirements for homogeneous yet non-redundant item batteries.

Test-Retest Stability

Longitudinal investigations conducted by Steel and Rentsch across multi-month evaluation intervals indicate adequate temporal stability ($r_{tt}$ coefficients ranging between $.62$ and $.71$). This demonstrates that while the measure captures enduring affective dispositions toward the job, it remains sensitive to genuine environmental changes, job redesign interventions, and leadership transitions.

Factor Analysis

The latent structure of the Andrews and Withey five-item scale has been evaluated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) techniques:

Unidimensional Factor Structure

Principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood EFA conducted by Rentsch and Steel (1992) consistently identify a dominant single general factor that accounts for a substantial proportion of total variance (typically exceeding 52% to 58% of explained variance). Item-to-total correlations and standardized factor loadings on this general job satisfaction dimension are uniformly strong:

• Item 1 (Overall Job): Standardized factor loading $lambda = .76 – .82$
• Item 2 (Co-workers): Standardized factor loading $lambda = .55 – .64$
• Item 3 (Work Itself): Standardized factor loading $lambda = .72 – .78$
• Item 4 (Physical Surroundings / Workload): Standardized factor loading $lambda = .58 – .66$
• Item 5 (Equipment / Supervision): Standardized factor loading $lambda = .67 – .74$

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Model Fit

In structural equation modeling frameworks testing one-factor measurement models, the scale displays acceptable goodness-of-fit indices when specifying a single latent construct of job facet satisfaction. Representative CFA fit metrics reported across empirical studies include:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $ge .95$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $ge .93$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $le .06$
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $le .04$

These structural findings confirm that while each item targets a distinct operational facet (co-workers, workload, supervision, the work itself, and overall job), the items share sufficient common variance to justify aggregating them into a single continuous index representing general facet-based job satisfaction.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Type: Self-administered psychological questionnaire / multidimensional job satisfaction rating scale.
• Administration Method: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire, enterprise intranet survey, or computerized psychological assessment battery.
• Target Population: Adult working populations across diverse occupational sectors, including corporate, public, military, and non-profit contexts.
• Completion Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Item Count: 5 items.
• Response Format: 7-point Likert-type Delighted–Terrible rating scale:
  • 7 = Delighted
  • 6 = Pleased
  • 5 = Mostly satisfied
  • 4 = Mixed (about equally satisfied and dissatisfied)
  • 3 = Mostly dissatisfied
  • 2 = Unhappy
  • 1 = Terrible
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Composite Sum Score: Sum the numerical values of all 5 items. Range: 5 to 35. Higher scores reflect greater job satisfaction.
  • Composite Mean Score: Calculate the arithmetic mean across the 5 items ($[Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3 + Item 4 + Item 5] / 5$). Range: 1.0 to 7.0.
  • Facet-Level Analysis: Items 2 through 5 may be evaluated individually as distinct single-item indicators of specific facets (co-workers, work itself, working conditions, and supervision/resources).
  • Reverse Scoring: None. All items are positively keyed toward higher satisfaction.

Permissions, Fee, and Test Year

The conceptual framework and initial response format of this instrument were published by Frank M. Andrews and Stephen B. Withey in 1976 within their monograph Social Indicators of Well-Being: Americans’ Perceptions of Life Quality (Plenum Press / Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan). The specific five-item workplace adaptation was subsequently evaluated and operationalized within occupational psychometrics by Joan R. Rentsch and Robert P. Steel in their 1992 validation study published in Educational and Psychological Measurement (Sage Publications, Inc.).

The scale items are available in the public academic literature and are widely utilized in organizational research without licensing fees for non-commercial, scholarly research and educational purposes. When reproducing the scale in scientific manuscripts or academic theses, scholars should properly cite Andrews and Withey (1976) and Rentsch and Steel (1992). Commercial deployment, inclusion within proprietary software platforms, or large-scale organizational consultancy distributions may require copyright clearance from Sage Publications, Inc. or the original publishing entities.

References

• Andrews, F. M., & Withey, S. B. (1976). Social indicators of well-being: Americans’ perceptions of life quality. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-2253-5
• Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 250–279. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90016-7
• Herzberg, F., Mausner, B., & Snyderman, B. B. (1959). The motivation to work (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
• House, J. S. (1981). Work stress and social support. Addison-Wesley.
• 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.
• McFarlin, D. B., & Rice, R. W. (1992). What considers two facets of job satisfaction: The role of facet importance and facet satisfaction in predicting overall job satisfaction. Journal of Business and Psychology, 6(4), 487–498. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01126774
• Rentsch, J. R., & Steel, R. P. (1992). Construct and concurrent validation of the Andrews and Withey Job Satisfaction Questionnaire. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 52(2), 357–367. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013164492052002011
• 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.
• Steel, R. P., & Rentsch, J. R. (1995). Influence of work attitudes on turnover: A multi-sample path-analytic test of Mobley, Horner, and Hollingsworth’s (1978) model. Journal of Management, 21(5), 903–923. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639502100506
• Steel, R. P., & Rentsch, J. R. (1997). The role of intentionality and job satisfaction in turnover decisions: A path-analytic test of Mobley’s structural model. Human Relations, 50(9), 1089–1112. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872679705000903
• Weiss, D. J., Dawis, R. V., England, G. W., & Lofquist, L. H. (1967). Manual for the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire. Minnesota Studies in Vocational Rehabilitation, No. 22. University of Minnesota.

Items of the Scale