The relative effect of voice, autonomy, and the wage on satisfaction with work

This article uses data from the 2004 wave of the Workplace Employment Relations Survey to investigate the relative effects of the wage, worker autonomy and voice on self-reported satisfaction with work. The article adds two innovations: it considers a disaggregated measure of job satisfaction that considers satisfaction with the work task itself, and it explicitly compares the relative explanatory power of the wage, voice and autonomy. It is found that voice and autonomy play a much larger role than the wage in explaining satisfaction with work. The results are consistent with the assertion that there is an important distinction between how individuals choose their place of work (decision utility) and what drives job satisfaction once they are employed (experience utility).