Job satisfaction: An evaluation using a fuzzy approach

Abstract Complexity in organizations and their environments, and the rapid development of globalization has generated new interest in developing an understanding of how working individuals are satisfied with their jobs. Job satisfaction, which is a complicated multi-dimensional concept, has been a popular topic of research for many decades. The interest in this topic has been embraced by psychologists, management scholars, and more recently even economists. Unfortunately, in existing studies job satisfaction is investigated using only exact data not taking into account uncertainty and vagueness of obtained initial information. In this paper we suggest a fuzzy logic approach to the evaluation of job satisfaction taking into account that it is not always possible to deal with exact data or data with sharply defined boundaries. More specifically, we propose a fuzzy rule-based approach to evaluate the job satisfaction in an organization. The factors/facets of job satisfaction were collected through interviews. Due to the qualitative aspect of job satisfaction, we used linguistic choices in the questionnaires. The results are used to compose fuzzy rules as a model of the relationship between job satisfaction levels and the affecting factors/facets. A real-world job satisfaction evaluation problem is used to illustrate the suggested approach.