International Journal of Physical and Social Sciences

Satisfaction is generally considered an ultimate goal of life; virtually every professional wants to be satisfied or happy. Research on job satisfaction traditionally has gathered data at the level of the overall job. But a job consists of many distinct tasks—some of which may be enjoyable, complex, and important, and some not. Job satisfaction research so far has not assessed affective or motivational properties of individual tasks; therefore, it is not known how experiences with individual tasks contribute to global job satisfaction. To address that question, a task analysis technique was developed and used together detailed descriptions of the time-allocation, importance, autonomy, attention demands, complexity, and enjoyment of each individual task performed by 80 professionals on a diverse sample of jobs.