Social Cognitive Career Theory and Subjective Well-Being in the Context of Work

Abstract

Subjective well-being has often been studied as a context-free construct, reflecting overall life satisfaction and characteristic levels of positive affect and negative affect. But there has also been much interest in domain-specific aspects of subjective well-being, such as job satisfaction. The authors provide a brief overview of the two primary conceptual approaches to the study of well-being in psychology and consider job satisfaction in relation to one of them (the hedonic approach). They then describe a newly developed social cognitive model that is designed to capture the interplay among multiple (e.g., affective, cognitive, behavioral, social) sources of job satisfaction. The model's potential implications for career assessment and intervention are also considered.