Affective-cognitive consistency of attitude as a moderator of the job satisfaction-performance relationship.

Past research has often shown that job satisfaction and job performance are uncorrelated. The current study was an attempt to clarify the relationship by examining the role of affective-cognitive consistency (ACC) to test whether attitudinal consistency affects the strength of the relationship. A secondary objective was to assess whether modified versions of the Overall Job Satisfaction Scale (OJS) and the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ), administered to 166 full-time employees from a variety of companies, may be regarded as affective and cognitive measures of job satisfaction respectively. This view was supported by means of exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic results. Overall job satisfaction was measured by a composite of the modified OJS and MSQ, and job performance was rated on a 10-point scale by the employees’ supervisors. Respondents’ scores on the modified OJS and MSQ were then used to form groups that were high or low in ACC. For employees who displayed high ACC regarding their job satisfaction attitudes, medium to large positive correlations between the job satisfaction measures and performance were obtained. In contrast, non-significant correlations were recorded for the low ACC groups. The hypothesis that ACC is a significant moderator of the relationship between job satisfaction and job performance was therefore supported