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Job satisfaction measure offers new business tool
BOWLING GREEN, O.—Bowling Green State University is partnering with a Florida survey research organization to offer businesses
an online tool that measures how satisfied their employees are in comparison to others nationwide.
The Normative Express® tool was developed by Amplitude Research, which is collaborating with Bowling Green's industrial/organizational
psychology program to provide job attitude measures that can be administered, scored and interpreted for any organization.
Amplitude offers the Job Descriptive Index (JDI) created in the mid-1960s by Dr. Patricia Smith, a BGSU professor emeritus
of psychology. The JDI is a measure of job satisfaction used throughout the world.
Assessment is focused on the five key areas that influence overall job satisfaction: the work itself, pay, co-workers, opportunities
for advancement and supervision.
In addition to measuring current employee job satisfaction, the Normative Express® allows organizations to easily compare
results from administration of the indexes over time, which can track trends in satisfaction and help leaders better understand
the impact of intervention programs. It is exclusively offered by Amplitude Research in cooperation with the JDI Research
Group at BGSU, which holds the copyright for the index as well as the Job in General (JIG) index.
All reports are automatically generated and include scorecards of relative employee satisfaction and customizable reporting
of absolute employee satisfaction. “By automatically tallying and analyzing the results, it saves small and large companies
the expense of hiring a consultant or specialist to compile the results,” said Dr. William Balzer, associate vice president
and dean of Continuing & Extended Education. Balzer is an industrial/organizational psychologist and former chair of the psychology
department.
The JDI Research Group worked closely with Amplitude to make sure the program correctly scored the results and that the information
is presented in easily understandable layman's terms, Balzer said.
The collaboration is part of BGSU's ongoing efforts to both commercialize its products and discoveries and to share the knowledge
it generates with the public, he noted.
The project was begun several years ago when Amplitude founder and CEO Stephen Birnkrant approached the group about combining
his online survey tools with the content of the JDI and JIG. “I thought it was very forward-thinking of Bill (Balzer) to work
out this agreement for providing the JDI online,” said Dr. Jennifer Gillespie, an assistant professor of industrial/organizational
psychology and coordinator of the JDI Research Group. “We may be approaching the day when people are reluctant to take a pen-and-paper
test,” she said.
It is the normative data that makes the JDI so significant, Gillespie said, because it gives businesses a context in which
to consider the results of their employees' satisfaction ratings.
“Even more important,” she said, “is that this instrument is viewed by members of our field as one of the most thoroughly
researched and developed measures of its kind.” The careful attention to detail and field-testing is one of the attributes
for which Smith has become internationally recognized and that make the indexes so valuable, she added.
The JDI is also valued for the simplicity and clarity of its questions. It asks users to respond to short words or phrases
with one-word answers such as yes, no or question mark, Gillespie said. “In comparison with some other measures I've taken
into the field, people actually seem to enjoy answering these questions.”
The JDI Research Group was founded by Smith to develop and refine measures of employee job satisfaction. Balzer noted that
the group is the longest-running research group in the field of industrial/organizational psychology—almost 50 years. “She
deserves the kudos for all of this,” he said of its founder.
“Pat is a luminary,” Gillespie agreed. “Some of the most well-known people in the field were her students. I have truly been
honored to know her and to be able to be a part of what she has built and sustained here at BGSU.”
Among Smith's many other contributions to the field of industrial/organizational psychology are the creation of the Behaviorally
Anchored Rating Scales—a method of employee evaluation—and research into the effects of monotony and boredom in the workplace.
In 1984, she received the Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from the Society for Industrial and Organizational
Psychology, a division of the American Psychological Association.
When she joined the BGSU faculty, Smith explained industrial psychology as "the process of making work more satisfying to
everybody from the top executives on down," and noted there was “an acute shortage” of industrial psychologists. She helped
to alleviate that shortage through her efforts, along with those of Distinguished University Professor Emeritus Dr. Robert
Guion, to develop the industrial/organizational psychology program at Bowling Green. Today the program ranks third nationally,
according to the 2006 edition of "America's Best Graduate Schools," published by U.S. News & World Report.
Smith is still active in the JDI Research Group, whose other members include Gillespie and Dr. Michael Zickar, an associate
professor of industrial/organizational psychology, and Balzer.
To learn more about the JDI, visit http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/psych/JDI/.
To learn more about the industrial/organizational psychology program, visit http://showcase.bgsu.edu/io/.
To learn more about the Normative Express®, visit http://www.normativeexpress.com.
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(Posted February 15, 2006 )
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