Job Descriptive Index

Thank you for your interest in the Job Descriptive Index and related scales, owned by Bowling Green State University. This is the official home of the Job Descriptive Index (JDI), Job In General (JIG), Stress In General (SIG), and Trust in Management (TIM).

Obtaining and using the Job Descriptive Index and related scales

The JDI and related scales are frequently used by academic researchers and workplace professionals as a means of measuring employee attitudes such as job satisfaction. These scales are easy to administer, easy to read, simple in format, and scores may be compared to those from a nationally-representative sample of United States workers.

You can download the JDI and related scales, free of charge, for use in your research study or workplace development project. Download the JDI and related scales now!

About the scales

For more than 50 years, the Job Descriptive Index and related scales have been continually developed and refined by the university’s noted Job Descriptive Index Research Group. Comprised of numerous faculty members and Ph.D. students, members of the research group have used their expertise in psychology, scientific research methods, and organizational behavior to study workplace attitudes and behaviors using these scales. To encourage the use of the scales, the scales are available for you to use free of charge. Products and services related to our scales are available for purchase, and proceeds help to fund efforts in the future.

• The Job Descriptive Index is designed to measure employees' satisfaction with their jobs. The JDI is a “facet” measure of job satisfaction, meaning that participants are asked to think about specific facets of their job and rate their satisfaction with those specific facets. The JDI is comprised of five facets, including satisfaction with: coworkers, the work itself, pay, opportunities for promotion, and supervision.
• The Job In General is also designed to measure employees’ satisfaction with their jobs. The JIG is a measure of global satisfaction, meaning that participants are asked to think about how satisfied they are with their job in a broad, overall sense.
• The Abridged Job Descriptive Index and Abridged Job in General are shortened versions of the original scales. The abridged versions maintain adequate reliability, while reducing the administration time.
• The Stress in General is designed to measure employees’ general level of workplace stress. Participants are asked to think about whether or not particular stress-related descriptors are characteristic of their job.
• The Trust in Management is designed to measure employees’ feelings of trust toward senior management in their organization. Analysis of the scale revealed four factors (components) of trust: ability, benevolence, consistency, and integrity.

JDI and JIG norms

Development and determination of JDI and JIG nationally representative overall and subgroup norms is described in a forthcoming article (Gillespie, et al., in press). The tables includes overall and subgroup norms for JDI-coworker, JDI-pay, JDI-promotion, JDI-supervisor, JDI-work, and JIG (click on the links to download norm tables). These norm tables are provided in an effort to make the full revised measurement system widely available for use in research and practice. The norm tables are copyrighted by Bowling Green State University (2009) and can be referenced by the Journal of Managerial Psychology article.  

User’s Manuals, Automated Scoring Services, Norm-Referenced Scoring, and other services

It is strongly recommended that researchers and workplace professionals acquire the Quick Reference Guide prior to administering the JDI or other scales. These documents describe the development, validity, and reliability of the scales, as well as the proper administration, scoring, and interpretation of the scales. We offer solutions that can help you quickly recode your data for interpretation (automated scoring) and even compare scores from your sample to scores obtained from a large-scale, nationally-representative sample of United States workers (norm-referenced scoring).

Please visit our Secure Website to order these resources or contact the JDI Office with any inquiry or to speak with us about your project. All orders, both those made through our website and through direct email communication, are processed manually and may take approximately two business days to be fulfilled.