The social science literature, particularly in psychology, that may relate to faculty satisfaction, motivation, and commitment to teaching is reviewed. The question of satisfaction from work and its relation to motivation, a topic of controversy in the field (Greene, 1972) is examined, and the concept of motivation is briefly described from four perspectives: need/drive theory, expectancy theory, behaviorist theory, and flow theory. The important connections between these four perspectives and the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are addressed. The impact on the psychology of the motivation to teach and the relatively newer notions of Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1978) are analyzed. It is suggested that faculty must be taught how to apprehend the latent satisfactions in the teaching profession, the noninstrumental activities that are nonetheless critical to the sense of work worth doing. New ways of conceiving of teaching and its satisfactions are introduced. The contexts for understanding these new modes come from the literature of psychology. An attempt is made to show the relationships among productivity, satisfaction, and feedback as well as the conditions that may bear on those variables. In institutionalizing a feedback system, not only must instructors receive more feedback to maximize their satisfactions and productivity, but students and faculty who provide the feedback must also have feedback of their own. If feedback is seen as valuable it will more likely continue and the communication process and channels will be institutionalized. (SW)