The Quality of the Social Environment at Work and Job Satisfaction¹

The relation between social factors at work and job satisfaction was studied by measuring two components of a social environment: a common social environment, the social climate shared by employees in the same work setting: and an individual social environment, the individual's unique social space within that setting. An analysis of questionnaire data from 299, mostly female, bank workers indicated that there is a moderate relation between the quality of the social environment at work and individual job satisfaction. This finding held even when independent judges' (i.e., coworkers') ratings were used as the measure of the common social environment. The results were also consistent with the hypothesis that job satisfaction is more strongly linked to the quality of supervisor relations than to relationships with coworkers. Contrary to expectations, the common social environment at work was a better predictor of job satisfaction than was the individual social environment, and supervisors and coworkers appeared to contribute equally to perceptions of the common environment.