Based on 7,939 business units in 36 companies, this study used meta-analysis to examine the relationship at the business-unit level between employee satisfaction–engagement and the business-unit outcomes of customer satisfaction, productivity, profit, employee turnover, and accidents. Generalizable relationships large enough to have substantial practical value were found between unit-level employee satisfaction–engagement and these business-unit outcomes. One implication is that changes in management practices that increase employee satisfaction may increase business-unit outcomes, including profit.

Locke, in his seminal 1976 review of the job satisfaction literature, noted that more than 3,300 articles had been published on the topic of job satisfaction. A search of PsycINFO for the years 1976 through 2000 revealed at least another 7,855 publications on the subject. Most job satisfaction studies (and subsequent meta-analyses) have focused on the individual employee level as a unit of analysis. For example, researchers have found positive linkages between general workplace attitudes and individual performance outcomes (Iaffaldano & Muchinsky, 1985). A recent meta-analysis showed a substantial relation between individual job satisfaction and individual performance (r = .30; Judge, Thoresen, Bono, & Patton, 2001). Even though it is more common to study employee attitude data at the individual employee level, studying data at the business-unit level is critical because that is the level at which employee survey data are typically reported to client organizations. Business-unit-level research also provides opportunities to establish linkages to outcomes that are directly relevant to most businesses. Important outcomes such as customer loyalty, profitability, productivity, employee turnover, and safety variables are typically aggregated and reported at the business-unit level. A final advantage to reporting and studying data at the business-unit level is that single-item scores are similar in reliability to subscale or dimension scores at the individual level of analysis because each work-group item score is...