Are you really satisfied in life? Developing a scale on life satisfaction

Abstract

PurposeThis study attempted to measure life satisfaction and developed a scale to measure its dimensions with the required psychometric properties (validity and reliability). In today’s scenario, organizations are focusing on life satisfaction by helping employees to maintain their work-life balance. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a robust scale of life satisfaction.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology consists of three broad stages: item generation, scale development, and validity. Using the sample of 198 working executives, this study used the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and concluded the four dimensions of life satisfaction: work satisfaction, family satisfaction, societal satisfaction and self-satisfaction.FindingsThe results provide academicians and practitioners with new insight and dimensions of life satisfaction. The result of this study shows that life satisfaction has societal satisfaction, family satisfaction, job satisfaction and self-satisfaction dimensions.Practical implicationsThis study will provide practitioners with new dimensions to measure life satisfaction. They can help employees achieve life satisfaction across four different factors. This will enable more employee satisfaction, an increase in retention rate and an increase in employee performance. Furthermore, this study provides implications from a policy perspective to design the business policy by considering life satisfaction as an important part of formulating and implementing human resource policies.Originality/valueThis study is unique in terms of exploring the dimensions of life satisfaction in a structured manner and establishing the psychometric properties as construct, content, and criterion validity along with reliability. This scale can be further used in future research to measure the life satisfaction construct.