The relationship between job satisfaction and health: a meta-analysis
verifiedrich profile · Occupational and Environmental Medicine · 2005
Faragher, E B; Cass, M; Cooper, C L
How this was studied
A meta-analytic synthesis — it pools many primary studies rather than running a single design, so there is no single-study diagram.
What this article reports
The findings we extracted from this work, normalized into Principia’s relationship form (X → Y). Each feeds the synthesized models below.
burnout → job satisfaction
Models this article informs
The meta-analytic priors this article contributes evidence to — its place in the broader synthesis.
In the authors’ words
The article’s own abstract.
BACKGROUND: A vast number of published studies have suggested a link between job satisfaction levels and health. The sizes of the relationships reported vary widely. Narrative overviews of this relationship have been published, but no systematic meta-analysis review has been conducted. METHODS: A systematic review and meta-analysis of 485 studies with a combined sample size of 267 995 individuals was conducted, evaluating the research evidence linking self-report measures of job satisfaction to measures of physical and mental wellbeing. RESULTS: The overall correlation combined across all health measures was r = 0.312 (0.370 after Schmidt-Hunter adjustment). Job satisfaction was most strongly associated with mental/psychological problems; strongest relationships were found for burnout (corrected r = 0.478), self-esteem(r = 0.429), depression (r = 0.428), and anxiety(r = 0.420). The correlation with subjective physical illness was more modest (r = 0.287). CONCLUSIONS: Correlations in excess of 0.3 are rare in this context. The relationships found suggest that job satisfaction level is an important factor influencing the health of workers. Organisations should include the development of stress management policies to identify and eradicate work practices that cause most job dissatisfaction as part of any exercise aimed at improving employee health. Occupational health clinicians should consider counselling employees diagnosed as having psychological problems to critically evaluate their work-and help them to explore ways of gaining greater satisfaction from this important aspect of their life.
What the literature says about it
Attributed, open-access quotes from other works that cite this article, plus the citation-graph verdict tally. Corroborations and disputes, in one place — the honest-broker view.
supports “The researchers also found that job dissatisfaction can cause employees to experience burnout, low self-esteem, anxiety, and depression, creating a negative effect on their well-being (Faragher et al., 2005).”
supports “This will have the greatest benefits for employee mental health through its impact on job satisfaction (particularly the reduction in the degree of burnout/emotional exhaustion) and a beneficial knock-on effect on organizational health [58].”
supports “Aazami et al. 38 showed that job satisfaction negatively impacted depression and anxiety in female public-sector workers in Malaysia, while Faragher et al. 39 conducted a meta-analysis of various studies carried out in several countries, which indicated an association between job satisfaction and burnout, depression, and anxiety.”
supports “The results of a meta-analysis including 485 articles showed that job dissatisfaction was strongly associated with burnout, psychiatric problems, depression and anxiety [16].”
Ancillary research
Neighbouring works in the citation graph around this article.
Assembled from Principia’s registry — bibliographic record, extracted effect sizes, the models they inform, and open-access citing literature.