2. Chapter Learning Objectives
• After studying this chapter, you should be able to:
– Contrast the three components of an attitude.
– Summarize the relationship between attitudes and behavior.
– Compare and contrast the major job attitudes.
– Define job satisfaction and show how it can be measured.
– Summarize the main causes of job satisfaction.
– Identify four employee responses to dissatisfaction.
– Show whether there are cultural differences in job
satisfaction.
3. Attitudes
Evaluative statements or judgments
concerning objects, people, or events
Three components of an attitude:
The emotional orThe emotional or
feeling segmentfeeling segment
of an attitudeof an attitude
The opinion orThe opinion or
belief segment ofbelief segment of
an attitudean attitude
An intention to behaveAn intention to behave
in a certain wayin a certain way
toward someone ortoward someone or
somethingsomething
4. Does Behavior Always Follow from
Attitudes?
• Leon Festinger – No, the reverse is sometimes true!
• Cognitive Dissonance: Any incompatibility between two or more
attitudes or between behavior and attitudes
– Individuals seek to reduce this uncomfortable gap, or
dissonance, to reach stability and consistency
– Consistency is achieved by changing the attitudes, modifying
the behaviors, or through rationalization
– Desire to reduce dissonance depends on:
• Importance of elements
• Degree of individual influence
• Rewards involved in dissonance
5. Moderating Variables
• The most powerful moderators of the attitude-behavior
relationship are:
– Importance of the attitude
– Correspondence to behavior
– Accessibility
– Existence of social pressures
– Personal and direct experience of the attitude
6. Predicting Behavior from Attitudes
– Important attitudes have a strong relationship to
behavior.
– The closer the match between attitude and
behavior, the stronger the relationship:
• Specific attitudes predict specific behavior
• General attitudes predict general behavior
– The more frequently expressed an attitude, the
better predictor it is.
– High social pressures reduce the relationship and
may cause dissonance.
– Attitudes based on personal experience are
stronger predictors.
7. What are the Major Job Attitudes?
• Job Satisfaction
– A positive feeling about the job
resulting from an evaluation of its
characteristics
• Job Involvement
– Degree of psychological identification
with the job where perceived
performance is important to self-worth
• Psychological Empowerment
– Belief in the degree of influence over
the job, competence, job
meaningfulness, and autonomy
8. Another Major Job Attitude
• Organizational Commitment
– Identifying with a particular organization and its goals, while wishing
to maintain membership in the organization.
– Three dimensions:
• Affective – emotional attachment to organization
• Continuance Commitment – economic value of staying
• Normative – moral or ethical obligations
– Has some relation to performance, especially for new employees.
– Less important now than in the past – now perhaps more of an
occupational commitment, loyalty to profession rather than a given
employer.
9. And Yet More Major Job
Attitudes…
• Perceived Organizational Support (POS)
– Degree to which employees believe the organization values their
contribution and cares about their well-being.
– Higher when rewards are fair, employees are involved in decision
making, and supervisors are seen as supportive.
– High POS is related to higher OCBs and performance.
• Employee Engagement
– The degree of involvement with, satisfaction with, and enthusiasm for
the job.
– Engaged employees are passionate about their work and company.
10. Are These Job Attitudes Really Distinct?
• No: these attitudes are highly
related.
• Variables may be redundant
(measuring the same thing
under a different name)
• While there is some
distinction, there is also a lot
of overlap.
Be patient, OB researchers are working on it!
11. Job Satisfaction
• One of the primary job attitudes measured.
– Broad term involving a complex individual summation of a number of
discrete job elements.
• How to measure?
– Single global rating (one question/one answer)
– Summation score (many questions/one average)
• Are people satisfied in their jobs?
– In India, yes. Seventy-one percent of Indian employees
– surveyed are satisfied with their jobs.
– Results vary by employee facets of the job.
– Compensation, benefits, and incentives are the most problematic
elements in India.
12. • Pay influences job satisfaction only to a point.
– Once an individual reaches a comfortable level of living,
there is no relationship between amount of pay and job
satisfaction.
– Money may bring happiness, but not necessarily job
satisfaction.
• Personality can influence job satisfaction.
– Negative people are usually not satisfied with their jobs.
– Those with positive core self-evaluation are more
satisfied with their jobs.
Causes of Job Satisfaction
14. Outcomes of Job Satisfaction
• Job Performance
– Satisfied workers are more productive AND
more productive workers are more satisfied!
– The causality may run both ways.
• Organizational Citizenship Behaviors
– Satisfaction influences OCB through
perceptions of fairness.
• Customer Satisfaction
– Satisfied frontline employees increase
customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Absenteeism
15. More Outcomes of Job Satisfaction
• Turnover
– Satisfied employees are less likely to quit.
– Many moderating variables in this relationship.
• Economic environment and tenure
• Organizational actions taken to retain high performers and
to weed out lower performers
• Workplace Deviance
– Dissatisfied workers are more likely to unionize, abuse
substances, steal, be tardy, and withdraw.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of the impact of job satisfaction
on the bottom line, most managers are either unconcerned about
or overestimate worker satisfaction.
16. Global Implications
• Are Employees in Some Cultures More Satisfied With
Their Jobs?
– According to some studies, Western workers appear to
be more satisfied than those in Eastern cultures. This
may be because Westerners emphasize positive
emotions and individual happiness more than do those
in Eastern cultures.
– Another study showed that Indian employees rated their
satisfaction higher than other employees in the Asia-
Pacific region.
17. Summary and Managerial
Implications
• Managers should watch employee attitudes:
– They give warnings of potential problems
– They influence behavior
• Managers should try to increase job satisfaction and generate
positive job attitudes
– Reduces costs by lowering turnover, absenteeism,
tardiness, theft, and increasing OCB
• Focus on the intrinsic parts of the job: make work challenging
and interesting
– Pay is not enough
Hinweis der Redaktion
Attitudes are evaluative statements or judgments concerning objects, people, or events. Attitudes are made up of three components. The cognitive component is made up of the belief in the way things are. The affective component is the more critical part of the attitude as it is calls upon the emotions or feelings. The behavioral component describes the intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or something. These three components work together to aid in our understanding of the complexity of an attitude.
Sometimes we observe people who will change what they say so it doesn’t contradict their behavior. When attitudes and behaviors don’t line up, individuals will experience cognitive dissonance. This incongruity is uncomfortable and individuals will seek to reduce the dissonance to find consistency.
People are willing to live with some discomfort but the degree to which this is true depends upon the importance of the elements, how much influences the individual has in the situation, and the rewards available.
Some variables do moderate the relationship between attitude and behavior. These factors include the importance of the attitude, the correspondence of the attitude to the behavior, the accessibility of the attitude, the existence of social pressures on behavior, and the personal and direct experience of the attitude.
These variables will impact the ability to predict how a certain attitude will predict behavior.
Predicting behavior from attitudes is more of an art than a science. There are many relationship factors that influence the ability to predict behavior. Some factors include the importance of the attitudes. The more tightly related the attitude is to values we hold dear, the stronger the relationship will be to the behavior. Also, the stronger the match between attitude and behavior, the stronger the relationship.
Attitudes that are frequently expressed, based on experience or where there is high social pressure, will also have a stronger relationship to the resulting behaviors.
The field of Organizational Behavior focuses on how attitudes will influence the workplace. There are several major job attitudes we will look at throughout the book. The first is job satisfaction, which is the positive feeling about the job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics. The second is job involvement. Job involvement looks at the degree of psychological identification with the job. An additional job attitude is psychological empowerment, the belief in the degree of influence over the job, competence in the job, and job meaningfulness.
A very important job attitude is organizational commitment or identifying with a particular organization and its goals. There are three dimensions to this job attitude – affective, continuance commitment, and normative. Organizational commitment has been found to have some relationship to performance and in particular for new employees. Over the years, this may be losing importance as people are tending to be more loyal to their profession than to a given employer.
Perceived Organizational Support is the degree to which employees believe the organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being. Perception of fairness is a key factor in determining employees’ willingness to work hard for the organization.
Employee Engagement goes beyond just job satisfaction and includes involvement and enthusiasm for the job. The more engaged the worker is, the more passionate they will be about their work.
There is a high degree of overlap between the different job attitudes. If a worker has higher job satisfaction, they tend to be more engaged and show a stronger commitment to the organization. Researchers are looking into trying to find ways to measure the different attitudes to get at their distinctiveness.
Job satisfaction is defined as a positive feeling about a job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics. This is an important job attitude because it incorporates so many of the other measures. There are multiple ways to measure job satisfaction, but the most accurate way is to ask the question if people are satisfied in their jobs and provide them with a scale to report their degree of satisfaction.
People are generally satisfied in their jobs in the United States, but over the last several years, job satisfaction has been decreasing. When work is divided up into facets, results vary. Typically, workers are more satisfied with the work itself and coworkers, while remaining less satisfied with promotion and pay.
Pay has an influence on job satisfaction but not as much as one might think. Typically, once a worker exceeds $40,000 per year, pay has limited impact on the level of satisfied workers. Personality tends to be a bigger influence in job satisfaction levels. People who have a negative outlook on life tend to be less satisfied with their jobs. In addition, workers who have a strong sense of self-evaluation are more satisfied.
When employees are dissatisfied with their jobs, they have four basic responses they can utilize. These options are divided into active and passive choices. The active options are exit and voice. If employees select to exit, they choose to leave or move in a direction of leaving the organization. In voice, the employees will work toward active and constructive attempts to improve conditions. The passive options are neglect and loyalty. Employees may choose to neglect their work and just allow conditions to worsen or they may choose to remain loyal to the organization and just wait for change.
When employees are satisfied with their work, there are many positive outcomes in the workplace. However, the inverse is true as well, if employees are dissatisfied in their work, these same job outcomes will be negatively impacted.
If a worker is satisfied in their job, they will remain in the job for a longer period of time than dissatisfied workers. However, as we have seen recently, workers are willing to stay in jobs where they are not satisfied because the job market is tight due to tough economic conditions.
Dissatisfied workers are more likely to cause problems in the workplace by stealing, absenteeism, limiting productivity, and other negative work outcomes.
Job satisfaction is not solely a U.S. concept, but much of the research has been done in the U.S. so more research is needed to effectively expand these theories to other cultures. Workers in Western cultures do tend to be more satisfied in their jobs, but this could be due to the fact that Western cultures put greater emphasis on emotions and individual happiness than other cultures do.
Attitudes are important components of the workplace and definitely influence behaviors. Managers should be aware of job attitudes and their influence on job satisfaction. The most effective way to do this is to focus on making work challenging and interesting, especially at higher-level jobs where pay is not enough to satisfy workers.