Psychological well-being and job satisfaction as predictors of job performance.

Managerial Sciences Department, University of Nevada, Reno 89557-0206, USA. taw@scs.unr.edu

The happy-productive worker hypothesis has most often been examined in organizational research by correlating job satisfaction to performance. Recent research has expanded this to include measures of psychological well-being. However, to date, no field research has provided a comparative test of the relative contribution of job satisfaction and psychological well-being as predictors of employee performance. The authors report 2 field studies that, taken together, provide an opportunity to simultaneously examine the relative contribution of psychological well-being and job satisfaction to job performance. In Study 1, psychological well-being, but not job satisfaction, was predictive of job performance for 47 human services workers. These findings were replicated in Study 2 for 37 juvenile probation officers. These findings are discussed in terms of research on the happy-productive worker hypothesis.

PMID: 10658888 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]