The present study continues the long line of research addressing Person-Environment fit started by Frank Parsons a century ago and the construct of career satisfaction. Previous research emphasized Holland themes and specific occupational scales, with this study being the first to evaluate the higher order of personal style relating to job satisfaction. This study examined the capacity of the General Occupational Themes (GOTs) and Personal Style Scales (PSSs) of the 2005 Strong Interest Inventory in predicting job satisfaction across 8 individual samples comprising 4,938 working adults. Sequential discriminant function analyses demonstrated that sets of hypothesized PSSs significantly distinguished between satisfied and dissatisfied workers beyond the six Holland themes in all 8 occupational samples. This research provided validation and support for the newly added Team Orientation PSS. It further provided support for demographic variables related to job satisfaction, including ethnicity, gender, age, and the reason for testing.

The Strong Interest Inventory (SII; Donnay, Morris, Schaubhut, & Thompson, 2005) has a broad research base commonly comprised of vocationally-relevant constructs such as career satisfaction (Hees, 2010), self-efficacy (Betz & Borgen, 2000), and educational aspirations (Rottinghaus, Lindley, Green, & Borgen, 2002). The present study aimed to expand the research base on the SII by linking the fields of vocational and positive psychology by examining the relationships between vocational interests, personal styles, and subjective well-being. This study focused specifically on the General Occupational Themes (GOTs) and Personal Style Scales (PSSs) of the SII by exploring the relationship between these scales and subjective well-being across a sample of 4945 working adults in eight occupations, including administrative assistant, a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields composite, realtor, elementary school teacher, sales manager, graphic designer, attorney, and automobile mechanic. Regression analyses demonstrated that the GOTs and PSSs individually explain a significant portion of variance in subjective well-being, as well as that the PSSs explain a significant amount of variance in subjective well-being above and beyond the GOTs. Occupation-specific hypotheses for GOTs and PSSs were also supported for 4 of the 8 occupations. This study provides further validation for the 2005 SII, specifically the newest PSS, Team Orientation. Future research, theory, and practice implications are discussed herein.