Attitudes and Job Satisfaction
Attitudes
Attitudes are evaluative statements—either favorable or unfavorable—about objects, people, or events. They reflect how we feel about something. When you say “I like my job,” you are expressing your attitude about your work.
The components of an attitude
The statement “My pay is low” is a cognitive component of an attitude—a description of or belief in the way things are. It sets the stage for the more critical part of an attitude—its affective component. Affect is the emotional or feeling segment of an attitude reflected in the statement, “I am angry over how little I’m paid.” Affect can lead to behavioral outcomes. The behavioral component of an attitude describes an intention to behave a certain way toward someone or something—as in, “I’m going to look for another job that pays better.”
Attitudes and Behavior
Early research on attitudes assumed they were causally related to behavior—that is, the attitudes people hold determine what they do. However, one researcher— Leon Festinger—argued that attitudes follow behavior. Other researchers have agreed that attitudes predict future behavior.
Did you ever notice how people change what they say so it doesn’t contradict what they do? Perhaps a friend of yours consistently argued that her apartment complex was better than yours until another friend in your complex asked her to move in with him; once she moved to your complex, you noticed her attitude toward her former apartment became more critical. Cases of attitude following behavior illustrate the effects of cognitive dissonance, contradictions individuals might perceive between their attitudes and their behavior.
People seek consistency among their attitudes, and between their attitudes and their behavior. Any form of inconsistency is uncomfortable, and individuals will therefore attempt to reduce it. People seek a stable state, which is a minimum of dissonance. When there is a dissonance, people will alter either the attitudes or the behavior, or they will develop a rationalization for the discrepancy.
Recent research found, for instance, that the attitudes of employees who had emotionally challenging work events improved after they talked about their experiences with coworkers. Social sharing helped these workers adjust their attitudes to behavioral expectations.
No individual can avoid dissonance. You know texting while walking is unsafe, but you do it anyway and hope nothing bad happens. Or you give someone advice you have trouble following yourself. The desire to reduce dissonance depends on three factors, including the importance of the elements creating dissonance and the degree of influence we believe we have over the elements. The third factor is the rewards of dissonance; high rewards accompanying high dissonance tend to reduce tension inherent in the dissonance (dissonance is less distressing if accompanied by something good, such as a higher pay raise than expected). Individuals are more motivated to reduce dissonance when the attitudes are important or when they believe the dissonance is due to something they can control.
Job Attitudes
We have thousands of attitudes, but OB focuses on a very limited number that form positive or negative evaluations employees hold about their work environments. Much of the research has looked at three attitudes: job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment. Other important attitudes include perceived organizational support and employee engagement.
Job satisfaction and Job involvement
When people speak of employee attitudes, they usually mean job satisfaction, a positive feeling about a job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics. A person with high job satisfaction holds positive feelings about the work, while a person with low satisfaction holds negative feelings. Because OB researchers give job satisfaction high importance.
Related to job satisfaction is job involvement, the degree to which people identify psychologically with their jobs and consider their perceived performance levels important to their self-worth. Employees with high job involvement strongly identify with and really care about the kind of work they do. Another closely related concept is psychological empowerment, or employees’ beliefs in: the degree to which they influence their work environment, their competencies, the meaningfulness of their job, and their perceived autonomy.
Organizational Commitment
The degree to which an employee identifies with a particular organization and its goals and wishes to maintain membership in the organization.
Perceived organizational support
The degree to which employees believe an organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being.
People perceive their organizations as supportive when rewards are deemed fair, when employees have a voice in decisions, and when they see their supervisors as supportive. POS is a predictor, but there are some cultural influences. POS is important in countries where the power distance, the degree to which people in a country accept that power in institutions and organizations is distributed unequally, is lower. In low power-distance countries like the United States, people are more likely to view work as an exchange than as a moral obligation, so employees look for reasons to feel supported by their organizations. In high power-distance countries like China, employee POS perceptions are not as deeply based on demonstrations of fairness, support, and encouragement.
Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is an individual’s involvement with, satisfaction with, and enthusiasm for the work he or she does. To evaluate engagement, we might ask employees whether they have access to resources and opportunities to learn new skills, whether they feel their work is important and meaningful, and whether interactions with coworkers and supervisors are rewarding. Highly engaged employees have a passion for their work and feel a deep connection to their companies; disengaged employees have essentially checked out, putting time but not energy or attention into their work.
Job Satisfaction
We have already discussed job satisfaction briefly. Now let’s dissect the concept more carefully. How do we measure job satisfaction? What causes an employee to have a high level of job satisfaction? How do satisfied employees affect an organization?
Measuring Job Satisfaction
Two approaches are popular. The single global rating is a response to one question, such as “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your job?” Respondents circle a number between 1 and 5 on a scale from “highly satisfied” to “highly dissatisfied.” The second method, the summation of job facets, is more sophisticated. It identifies key elements in a job such as the type of work, skills needed, supervision, present pay, promotion opportunities, culture, and relationships with coworkers. Respondents rate these on a standardized scale, and researchers add the ratings to create an overall job satisfaction score.
How satisfied are People in their jobs?
What Causes Job Satisfaction?
Job conditions
Generally, interesting jobs that provide training, variety, independence, and control satisfy most employees. Interdependence, feedback, social support, and interaction with coworkers outside the workplace are also strongly related to job satisfaction, even after accounting for characteristics of the work itself.Thus, job conditions—especially the intrinsic nature of the work itself, social interactions, and supervision—are important predictors of job satisfaction. Although each is important, and although their relative value will vary across employees, the intrinsic nature of the work is most important.
Personality
As important as job conditions are to job satisfaction, personality also plays an important role. People who have positive core self-evaluations (CSEs)—who believe in their inner worth and basic competence—are more satisfied with their jobs than people with negative CSEs. Additionally, in the context of career commitment, CSE influences job satisfaction as people with high levels of both CSE and career commitment may realize particularly high job satisfaction.
Pay
You’ve probably noticed that pay comes up often when people discuss job satisfaction. Pay does correlate with job satisfaction and overall happiness for many people, but the effect can be smaller once an individual reaches a standard level of comfortable living. Money does motivate people. But what motivates us is not necessarily the same as what makes us happy.
Corporate Social Responsibility (csr)
Would you be as happy to work for an organization with a stated social welfare mission as one without? An organization’s commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR), or its self-regulated actions to benefit society or the environment beyond what is required by law, increasingly affects employee job satisfaction. Organizations practice CSR in a number of ways, including environmental
sustainability initiatives, nonprofit work, and charitable giving.
Outcomes of Job Satisfaction
- Job Performance
- Organizational citizenship behavior (ocb)
- Customer satisfaction
- Life satisfaction
The Impact of Job Dissatisfaction
What happens when employees dislike their jobs? One theoretical model—the exit–voice–loyalty–neglect framework—is helpful for understanding the consequences of dissatisfaction. Exhibit 3-6 illustrates employees’ four responses to job dissatisfaction, which differ along two dimensions: constructive/destructive and active/passive. The responses are as follows:- Exit The exit response directs behavior toward leaving the organization, including looking for a new position or resigning. To measure the effects of this response to dissatisfaction, researchers study individual terminations and collective turnover, the total loss to the organization of employee knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics.
- Voice The voice response includes actively and constructively attempting to improve conditions, including suggesting improvements, discussing problems with superiors, and undertaking union activity.
- Loyalty The loyalty response means passively but optimistically waiting for conditions to improve, including speaking up for the organization in the face of external criticism and trusting the organization and its management to “do the right thing.”
- Neglect. The neglect response passively allows conditions to worsen and includes chronic absenteeism or lateness, reduced effort, and an increased error rate.
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