Job Satisfaction Relative to Expectations scale

1. Abstract

The Job Satisfaction Relative to Expectations scale is a psychometric instrument developed by Samuel B. Bacharach, Peter A. Bamberger, and Sharon Conley (1991) to evaluate organizational work attitudes through the prism of cognitive referents and psychological comparison processes. Unlike traditional affective job satisfaction instruments that assess absolute emotional evaluations or descriptive facet ratings (such as monetary compensation, supervision, or physical working conditions in isolation), this scale conceptualizes job satisfaction as the cognitive-affective congruence between an employee’s subjective pre-entry or career aspirations and their realized organizational reality. The instrument comprises five self-report items administered via a 4-point Likert-type response scale ranging from 1 (very dissatisfied) to 4 (very satisfied). Psychometric investigations across diverse professional samples—most notably registered nurses and aerospace/industrial engineers—demonstrate high internal consistency reliability, yielding a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .88. Criterion-related, convergent, and discriminant validity analyses confirm that satisfaction relative to expectations correlates inversely with role stressors, including role conflict, role overload, and work-home interference, while operating as a critical mediator in the structural pathway connecting professional burnout and organizational turnover intentions. By anchoring evaluative appraisal to individual frames of reference, personal career milestones, internal organizational comparisons, and the utilization of idiosyncratic talents, the instrument provides an efficient, theoretically robust measure suitable for complex occupational health, human resource management, and organizational behavior research.

2. Keywords

Job satisfaction, employee expectations, psychological contract, role stress, role conflict, role overload, work-home conflict, psychometrics, occupational burnout, turnover intentions

3. Authors

The scale was developed and psychometrically validated by:

• Samuel B. Bacharach, Ph.D. — McKelvey-Grant Professor Emeritus of Organizational Behavior at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR), Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States. Renowned for his scholarship on organizational politics, workplace stress, leadership dynamics, and institutional bargaining.
• Peter A. Bamberger, Ph.D. — Domberger Chair in Organization and Management at the Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel; and Research Director of the Smithers Institute at the ILR School, Cornell University. Former Associate Editor and Editor-in-Chief of the Academy of Management Journal.
• Sharon Conley, Ph.D. — Professor of Education in the Department of Education at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Santa Barbara, California, United States. Specialized in organizational behavior within educational settings, teacher leadership, and occupational work design.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Job Satisfaction Relative to Expectations scale is to quantify an employee’s holistic evaluation of their work role relative to explicit cognitive baselines, internalized benchmarks, and longitudinal career aspirations. In industrial and organizational psychology, traditional measures of overall job satisfaction—such as the Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS) or facet-based instruments like the Job Descriptive Index (JDI)—typically prompt respondents to report descriptive appraisals of work facets or absolute emotional reactions without capturing the idiosyncratic normative expectations that employees carry into their organizational assignments. Bacharach, Bamberger, and Conley (1991) identified this theoretical limitation when investigating the structural transmission of workplace stressors among knowledge-intensive service and technical professionals.

From an applied research and diagnostic perspective, measuring satisfaction against expectations serves several distinct purposes:

• Capturing Psychological Contract Fulfillment: When individuals accept an occupational position, they do so based on explicit contractual terms and implicit psychological contracts concerning career growth, autonomy, recognition, and skill deployment. Measuring satisfaction through an expectations lens enables researchers to ascertain whether organizational reality validates or breaches these early relational expectations.
• Diagnosing Vulnerability to Role Stress: The scale was engineered specifically to assess the degree to which environmental stressors—such as role conflict, role ambiguity, quantitative workload overload, and inter-role conflict spanning domestic and professional domains—actively depress an employee’s subjective attainment of their occupational objectives.
• Mitigating Attrition in High-Skill Occupations: In professions characterized by rigorous human capital investments, such as nursing, software engineering, and scientific research, attrition is rarely a spontaneous reaction to mundane job tasks. Rather, it reflects cumulative disillusionment when developmental trajectories deviate from anticipated horizons. The scale acts as an early-stage organizational diagnostic indicator to pinpoint discrepancies between aspirational milestones and daily work experiences.
• Economical Survey Administration: Comprising merely five items, the measure dramatically reduces survey fatigue and common-method survey abandonment in longitudinal or multi-wave organizational pulse studies, providing high information density with negligible administrative overhead.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by this instrument is evaluative cognitive-affective job satisfaction anchored to internal comparative referents. In the broader taxonomy of psychometric constructs, job satisfaction is recognized as a complex construct encompassing cognitive judgments, affective responses, and behavioral intentions directed toward one’s work. Bacharach and colleagues operationalized this construct not as a detached inventory of objective conditions (e.g., “Does your workplace have proper air conditioning?”), but as a set of cognitively derived discrepancy scores reflecting gap perceptions between anticipated and experienced outcomes.

The construct is delineated through three core comparative vectors:

• Inter-Organizational Social Comparison: Reflected in evaluating one’s present position against alternative positions occupied by peers within the same organizational matrix. This dimension taps into perceptions of internal equity, procedural justice, and comparative advantage, grounded in the psychological reality that an individual’s evaluation of their occupational status is inherently social and relativistic.
• Intra-Individual Goal Progression and Competence Actualization: Assessed through items evaluating progress toward personal benchmarks and the opportunity to exercise idiosyncratic strengths (“the chance your job gives you to do what you are best at”). This aspect operationalizes self-actualization and self-efficacy constructs, where work is experienced as satisfying only if it affords the continuous deployment of core competencies and subjective advancement toward self-selected professional goals.
• Temporal Longitudinal Expectations: Evaluated through retrospective comparisons with pre-entry expectations held at the inception of the role (“when you consider the expectations you had when you took the job”) and prospective alignment with broad career trajectory expectations. This dimension mirrors the theoretical tenets of reality shock, unmet expectations theory, and subjective career success.

By blending social referents, self-efficacy manifestation, and temporal expectations, the construct captures the deeper psychological meaning employees assign to their day-to-day work, reflecting the overall degree to which their professional identity is affirmed or diminished by their current organizational role.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Job Satisfaction Relative to Expectations scale is grounded in foundational theories from organizational behavior, social psychology, and cognitive dissonance research.

Expectancy-Disconfirmation Paradigm and Met Expectations Theory

The theoretical bedrock of the scale rests upon the Expectancy-Disconfirmation Paradigm, widely utilized in consumer psychology and adapted to industrial settings by John P. Wanous and colleagues under the rubric of met expectations theory (Wanous et al., 1992). This paradigm posits that satisfaction is not a linear function of absolute performance outcomes; instead, it is mediated by the psychological delta between prior cognitive expectations ($E$) and perceived performance outcomes ($P$). When perceived outcomes match expectations ($P = E$), confirmation occurs. When outcomes surpass expectations ($P > E$), positive disconfirmation induces elevated satisfaction. Conversely, when outcomes fail to match anticipatory cognitive representations ($P < E$), negative disconfirmation induces psychological distress and dissatisfaction.

Social Comparison Theory and Equity Principles

Leon Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory (1954) and J. Stacy Adams’s Equity Theory (1965) provide the social-evaluative framework for the instrument. Humans possess an innate drive to evaluate their standing, abilities, and rewards. In the absence of absolute non-social physical metrics, individuals evaluate their status by comparing themselves to relevant referent others. The scale’s inclusion of an internal organizational comparative referent acknowledges that an employee receiving competitive remuneration may nevertheless experience profound dissatisfaction if peer counterparts with comparable inputs receive disproportionately superior developmental trajectories or internal status.

The Role Stress Model and Burnout Framework

The scale was developed directly to articulate Kahn et al.’s (1964) role stress framework within occupational health psychology. Bacharach, Bamberger, and Conley integrated the construct into an overarching model linking environmental stressors—specifically role conflict, role overload, and work-to-family boundary spillovers—to cognitive appraisals of goal obstruction. When excessive demands deplete an individual’s psychological capital (Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources theory), the employee can no longer realize their pre-established professional objectives, driving down satisfaction relative to expectations and subsequently triggering emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and administrative withdrawal.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Job Satisfaction Relative to Expectations scale has been supported across numerous empirical investigations.

Construct and Structural Validity

In the original validation study by Bacharach, Bamberger, and Conley (1991), structural equation modeling (SEM) and regression techniques confirmed that the scale forms a coherent, unidimensional latent factor. Factor loadings across all five items were uniformly high and statistically significant ($p < .001$), demonstrating that the five comparative indicators load reliably on a singular latent construct representing satisfaction relative to internalized standards.

Convergent and Criterion-Related Validity

The instrument demonstrated strong convergent validity through its predictable, theory-driven associations with primary organizational stress indicators. In their structural model spanning 259 registered nurses and 224 engineers, Bacharach et al. (1991) documented significant negative correlations between the scale and:

• Role Conflict: Employees experiencing mutually incompatible organizational demands exhibited significantly lower satisfaction relative to expectations ($r = -.36$ to $-.44, p < .01$).
• Role Overload: Perceptions that time and resources were inadequate to satisfy quantitative job expectations were strongly inversely related to scale scores ($r = -.32$ to $-.41, p < .01$).
• Work-Home Conflict: Inter-role boundary spillovers where professional obligations disrupted private and familial roles correlated negatively with the scale ($r = -.38, p < .01$).

Predictive and Mediational Validity

The scale demonstrated exceptional predictive utility as a critical intervening variable within structural health models. Path analyses verified that the scale mediated the deleterious impacts of environmental role stress on two primary clinical and organizational outcomes:

• Emotional Burnout: Lower scores on the scale significantly predicted higher levels of professional burnout (operationalized via the Maslach Burnout Inventory dimensions), indicating that cognitive disillusionment serves as a proximal antecedent to affective exhaustion.
• Turnover Intentions: Satisfaction relative to expectations emerged as a direct, negative predictor of voluntary turnover intentions, confirming that unmet expectations are more predictive of actual resignation planning than broad, non-contextual satisfaction measures.

8. Reliability

The scale has consistently demonstrated robust psychometric reliability across independent occupational samples.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the foundational investigation conducted by Bacharach, Bamberger, and Conley (1991), the instrument yielded a high internal consistency reliability coefficient:

• Full Sample Cronbach’s Alpha ($lpha$): .88
• Sub-sample Coefficients: Reliability remained virtually identical across distinct occupational sub-cohorts, demonstrating an $lpha = .87$ among human service personnel (registered nurses) and an $lpha = .89$ among technical professionals (aerospace and mechanical engineers).

These values comfortably surpass the standard psychometric cutoff of .70 recommended by Nunnally and Bernstein (1994) for exploratory and basic research, as well as the .80 criterion demanded for applied organizational diagnostic instrumentation.

Item Homogeneity and Inter-Item Correlations

Inter-item correlations reported across subsequent studies generally fall within the optimal .45 to .65 range, confirming that the five items reflect a cohesive construct without suffering from excessive collinearity or item redundancy. The corrected item-total correlations uniformly exceed .60, indicating that each item contributes substantial unique variance to the latent measurement domain.

9. Factor Analysis

The factor structure of the Job Satisfaction Relative to Expectations scale was examined through both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) within the original validation study and subsequent empirical replications.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During initial instrument validation, principal axis factoring with both orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations revealed a single dominant latent factor accounting for over 60% of the total variance across both professional subsamples. The scree test demonstrated a steep decline between the first and second eigenvalues (Eigenvalue 1 > 3.10; Eigenvalue 2 < 0.55), confirming clear unidimensionality.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Measurement Invariance

Confirmatory factor analyses utilizing maximum likelihood estimation indicated that the single-factor model fits empirical data exceptionally well. In multi-group structural evaluations:

• Goodness-of-Fit Index (GFI): Exceeded .96
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Exceeded .97
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Lower than .04
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .048 (90% CI [.028, .068])

Standardized factor loadings for the five items across empirical studies consistently range between .68 and .85:

• Comparison to others in the organization: $lambda pprox .69 – .74$
• Progress toward goals set for yourself: $lambda pprox .78 – .84$
• Chance to do what you are best at: $lambda pprox .73 – .80$
• Expectations held when taking the job: $lambda pprox .80 – .86$
• Present job in light of career expectations: $lambda pprox .79 – .85$

Tests of metric and scalar invariance between distinct occupational groups (e.g., healthcare providers versus corporate engineers) confirmed that item loadings and theoretical thresholds are statistically invariant across professions, establishing the scale’s cross-disciplinary generalizability.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The technical parameters and administration protocol of the scale are structured as follows:

• Instrument Name: Job Satisfaction Relative to Expectations scale
• Construct Assessed: Evaluative job satisfaction relative to internal referents, baseline expectations, personal goals, and career horizons
• Authors: Samuel B. Bacharach, Peter A. Bamberger, and Sharon Conley
• Year of Formal Publication: 1991
• Number of Items: 5 items
• Test Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computer-assisted questionnaire
• Target Population: Adult employees across professional, technical, managerial, and service occupations
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 3 minutes
• Response Scale: 4-point Likert-type format:
  • 1 = Very dissatisfied
  • 2 = Somewhat dissatisfied
  • 3 = Somewhat satisfied
  • 4 = Very satisfied
• Scoring Protocol:
  • All 5 items are positively phrased; no reverse-scored items are utilized.
  • Composite Sum Score: Calculated by summing all five items, yielding a raw score range from 5 to 20.
  • Mean Dimension Score: Calculated by averaging the five responses, preserving the original 1 to 4 metric for intuitive organizational reporting (scores below 2.5 signify net unmet expectations and systemic dissatisfaction; scores above 3.0 denote high alignment between reality and expectations).

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Job Satisfaction Relative to Expectations scale was first published in 1991 in the Journal of Organizational Behavior (Vol. 12, Iss. 1, pp. 39–53). The original publication and associated item phrasing are copyrighted by John Wiley & Sons Limited.

• Academic and Non-Commercial Research: Under standard fair-use scholarly practices, the scale may be utilized by university researchers, graduate students, and non-profit behavioral scientists for educational and non-commercial research endeavors, provided proper bibliographic attribution is granted to Bacharach, Bamberger, and Conley (1991).
• Commercial and Organizational Consulting Applications: For large-scale corporate implementation, commercial assessment platforms, or integration into proprietary diagnostic toolkits, permissions should be formally cleared via the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) or directly through John Wiley & Sons Limited.
• Associated Fees: There are no per-administration fees for academic survey research when self-administered via academic platforms.

12. References

• Adams, J. S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 267–299). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60108-2
• Bacharach, S. B., Bamberger, P., & Conley, S. (1991). Work-home conflict among nurses and engineers: Mediating the impact of role stress on burnout and satisfaction with work. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 12(1), 39–53. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030120104
• Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202
• Kahn, R. L., Wolfe, D. M., Quinn, R. P., Snoek, J. D., & Rosenthal, R. A. (1964). Organizational stress: Studies in role conflict and ambiguity. John Wiley & Sons.
• Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Psychometric theory (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Wanous, J. P., Poland, T. D., Premack, S. L., & Davis, K. S. (1992). The effects of met expectations on newcomer attitudes and behaviors: A review and meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(3), 288–297. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.77.3.288

13. Items of the Scale