Job satisfaction evaluation based on fuzzy conjoint method with continuous fuzzy sets

Abstract

Fuzzy conjoint method (FCM) is one of the available methods suggested for job satisfaction evaluation. The main feature of job satisfaction evaluation is the use of rating of agreement to indicate employee feelings and beliefs about their job. Currently the linguistic terms used for rating of agreement in FCM are represented in the form of discrete fuzzy sets.  This paper investigates the potential use of continuous fuzzy sets to represent linguistic terms used in the FCM process. To investigate the consistency of the decision outcomes produced by the proposed approach, four different types of fuzzy similarity measures were used: similarity based on Matching Function, similarity based on Euclidean Distance, similarity based on Set-Theoretic and similarity based on vector. These classification outcomes are also compared with classification drawn on the basis of statistical inference.  The finding of this study shows that both discrete fuzzy sets and continuous fuzzy sets produce consistent results regardless of whether the fuzzy similarity measure was used. Hence, the inclusion of other methods in FCM is particularly very useful for calculating the closeness coefficients and specifically addresses the shortcoming in FCM for job satisfaction evaluation.