Association between Locus of Control and Job Satisfaction in Employees: A Critical Review

Employee job satisfaction in the workplace is one of the important objectives of human resource managers and practitioners for better performance and productivity. Job satisfaction is a psychological state of human mind and it is subjective to individual experience and expectation, personality often plays an influential role. The term locus of control can be considered, a combination of one’s values, beliefs, past experiences, and cultural influence one’s life and behaviour. The internal-external locus of control constructs person’s internal expectancies for control of reinforcement. Further, it is believed that a person’s own behaviour determine the reinforcement they receive. The present research aims to investigate on the relationship between locus of control and job satisfaction and how does it influence, according to gender, culture, country, various sectors etc. The study will be based on different literature review in the area of concern. It will help us to develop a theoretical framework and a direction to solve for managerial problems of job satisfaction and performance of the employees. Dailey’s (1980) found that persons with an internal locus of control were more satisfied, motivated and had a high level of participation within their jobs. Some of the researches (Kircady et al., 2002; Noor, 2002; Martin et al., 2005; and Chen and Silverthorne, 2008) revealed that, there is a relationship between job satisfaction and locus of control. The present paper will be fulfilled with the gap of various dimensions such as how it is different according to gender, country, culture, and also in different sectors.