Conceptualizing Job Satisfaction and Its Determinants: A Systematic Literature Review

Job satisfaction is considered an important aspect of employee behavior. This article focuses on a critical analysis of the accompanying literature to determine the various factors that shape job satisfaction and to gauge their relative significance in conditioning employee behavior. The conceptualizations of job satisfaction in the existing literature are multitudinous, reflecting the breadth of critical perspectives on the subject. A systematic literature review, therefore, consisted of: (a) isolating databases and a set of publications; (b) selecting publications and developing a database; and (c) conducting bibliometric analysis, content analysis, and testing the relevance of results to further research. The review included publications from the years 2000-2018 and covered psychology, sociology, economics, and management science. Analysis of previous theoretical publications and empirical studies reveals that they are not without their cognitive and methodological limitations. Even at the level of definition, despite numerous critical attempts to clarify exactly what constitutes job satisfaction, an unambiguous and clear-cut conception has yet to surface. Equally, critical consensus is lacking among researchers over what contributes to job satisfaction, and divergent research approaches have been adopted as a result. Indeed, despite the rising popularity of job satisfaction studies, some of these factors have yet to be explored fully, while some research has yielded contradictory results regarding the strength of the influence of certain factors on job satisfaction. This paper fills this gap and, through a systematic analysis of the literature, indicates the direction in which current research is headed.