On the Use of Facet Importance as a Weighting Component of Job Satisfaction

Abstract

Though past research has not supported the strategy of using importance weights in constructing an overall index of job satisfaction from measures of satisfaction with diverse workplace facets, researchers should not be lulled into concluding that importance measures will not be useful in their research. Importance weights not only can contribute a good deal to scaling procedures when a multivariate framework is used that represents the additive and multiplicative contributions of work place facets and facet importance to a criterion, but even where the construction of scales is not of interest, importance weights may be used for tests of the worker-to-job fit hypothesis. These points are illustrated with moderator regression techniques on data representing the job satisfaction of 401 registered nurses in a large Western metropolitan area.