Janet Near spends a lot of time thinking about work. And not just her own. A professor of organizational theory at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business in Bloomington, Near studies work generally, and what satisfaction on the job has to do with overall happiness. What she's found may seem surprising, or even just plain wrong.

"For Americans, job satisfaction does not have nearly as much influence on overall happiness as we tend to assume it does," says Near, an energetic woman in her mid-50s who has published widely on work-life balance. "Compared to everything else that affects how satisfied we feel about our lives, like family, relationships, health and so on, work turns out to play a pretty small part--maybe 3 percent of the whole."

America is, according to a recent study, a veritable nation of workaholics; we spend around 50 percent more time on the job than most Europeans. So how is it possible that the thing we spend the most time doing doesn't have the largest influence on how satisfied we feel?

"It's not that being happy at work doesn't matter," Near says. "The fact is, the majority of Americans consider themselves to be pretty happy in general and expect that their jobs will basically satisfy their needs and expectations."

So job satisfaction is a part of the happiness equation, Near explains, just not in the way we often think it is. Instead of the actual particulars of the job determining satisfaction, we tend to come with a presumption that the job will satisfy, and so, more often than not, it does.

In a recent paper "Spillover Between Work Attitudes and Overall Life Attitudes: Myth or Reality?", Near and co-author Joseph C. Rode--now a professor at Miami University of Ohio--analyzed two large datasets measuring work and life satisfaction among U.S. workers. Near argues that "job attitudes and life attitudes are weakly related, whether measured concurrently or over time."

So why does the idea persist that being satisfied with what we do to earn a living plays such a central role in our overall sense of well-being, when the statistical evidence doesn't support it?

Read more about Janet Near's research and conclusions in IU's Research & Creative Activity magazine at www.indiana.edu/~rcapub/v29n2/satisfaction.shtml.