Work Satisfaction and Age: Some Evidence for the ‘Job Change’ Hypothesis

Previous research on work satisfaction has consistently shown that older people are more satisfied with their jobs than younger people. The present paper addresses three possible explanations for this tendency: (1) the "1now generation" of workers subscribes to a set of post-material values that contradict the demands of the industrial system and cause greater work discontent; (2) the standards of the old are systematically eroded by their years in the system, such that they learn to be satisfied with less; and (3) older workers simply have better jobs. A decisive choice among these hypotheses cannot be made without longitudinal data; nonetheless, the bulk of the evidence presented here (for economically active, salaried white males, drawn from the University of Michigan's 1972-73 Quality of Employment survey) clearly favors the last hypothesis. The academic literature on job satisfaction encompasses something in excess of 3000 independent studies (Campbell et al.; Kahn). Much of the existing research has focused on one of three basic topics: the sheer amount of satisfaction; the relationship between satisfaction and productivity; and the relationship between satisfaction and status, occupation, or social class. Concerning the first, the near-unanimous finding is that there is relatively little outright discontent; most people say they are "pretty satisfied" with their work (Kahn, 169).1 There is much less consensus on the second. Kahn's review, for example, concludes that "satisfaction is related to productivity in some circumstances and not in others, and that these circumstances have yet to be defined" (193). As for the link to social class, Jencks and associates have argued that the correlations between work satisfaction and various measures of social status "are surprisingly weak" (247). Prior studies, they suggest, simply "stress the importance of small differences between occupations." In contrast to the voluminous literature on work satisfaction and SES, there has not been much analysis of the relation between satisfaction