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Essentials of Organizational Behavior

Fourteenth Edition

Chapter 3

Attitudes and Job Satisfaction

After reading this chapter you should be able to:

Contrast the three components of an attitude.

Summarize the relationship between attitudes and behavior.

Compare the major job attitudes.

Identify the two approaches for measuring job satisfaction.

Summarize the main causes of job satisfaction.

Identify three outcomes of job satisfaction.

Identify four employee responses to dissatisfaction.

Attitudes

Attitudes: Evaluative statements – either favorable or unfavorable – concerning objects, people, or events

Reflect how one feels about something

Attitudes are statements that make an evaluation about objects, people, or events. They offer a favorable or unfavorable view that reflects how one feels about something.

Three Main Components of Attitudes

Attitudes are made up of three components. The cognitive component is composed of the belief in the way things are. The affective component is the more critical part of the attitude, as it 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.

Attitudes Follow Behavior: Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance: any inconsistency between two or more attitudes, or between behavior and attitudes

Individuals seek to minimize dissonance

Desire to reduce dissonance is determined by:

The importance of the elements creating the dissonance

The degree of influence the individual believes he or she has over the elements

The rewards that may be involved in dissonance

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 influence the individual has in the situation, and the rewards that are available.

Behavior Follows Attitudes: Moderating Variables

The most powerful moderators of the attitude-behavior relationships are:

Importance

Correspondence to behavior

Accessibility

Social pressures

Direct personal experience

Knowing attitudes helps predict behavior

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 estimate how a certain attitude will predict behavior.

Major Job Attitudes

Job satisfaction

Job involvement

Psychological empowerment

Organizational commitment

Affective commitment

Continuance commitment

Normative commitment

Perceived organizational support

Employee engagement

The field of organizational behavior focuses on how attitudes will influence the work place. 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, 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.

Employees also respond to how they perceive the organization supports them or POS. The more support they believe they are receiving, the more positive their job attitude will be. Engagement is beginning to be linked to many positive work outcomes. Evidence suggests these attitudes are highly related, perhaps to a troubling degree that makes one wonder whether there are useful distinctions to be made among them. There is some distinctiveness among attitudes, but they overlap greatly for various reasons, including the employee’s personality. If you as a manager know someone’s level of job satisfaction, you know most of what you need to know about how that person sees the organization. Recent research suggests that managers tend to identify their employees as belonging to one of four distinct categories: enthusiastic stayers, reluctant stayers, enthusiastic leavers, and reluctant leavers.

Measuring Job Satisfaction (1 of 2)

Job satisfaction: a positive feeling about a job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics

Measuring job satisfaction:

Single global rating method

Only a few general questions

Remarkably accurate

Summation score method

Identifies key elements in the job and asks for specific feeling about them

Discussing job satisfaction is intuitively a good thing in an organization, as it is a concept people understand, and it is important to recognize because of its bottom line impact. However, job satisfaction is something that is not easy to measure.

One method for measure is the Single Global Rating method. This method asks one question such as “How satisfied are you with your job?” and gives options such as extremely satisfied to extremely dissatisfied. It does not go into the many facets of a job, so it does not help the organization break down where the problems are.

The Summation Score Method is more sophisticated in that it asks about the various job components and breaks down how employees are specifically feeling about the different aspects of the job; thus it offers a more comprehensive look at job satisfaction.

Measuring Job Satisfaction (2 of 2)

Average Job Satisfaction by Facets

Job Satisfaction by Country

Evidence suggests that employees in Western cultures have higher levels of job satisfaction than those in Eastern cultures.

What Causes Job Satisfaction?

The Work Itself – the strongest correlation with overall satisfaction

Social Component – there is a strong correlation with how people view the social context of their work

Pay – not correlated after individual reaches a level of comfortable living

Corporate Social Responsibility – it’s good for the planet and good for people

The type of work people do and their desire to do that type of work has the strongest correlation with job satisfaction.

There is also a strong link between the social context of the work place and how people view their work. The more they enjoy the social aspects of their job, the more satisfied they are with the job.

Pay has an influence on job satisfaction but not as much as one might think. Typically, once a worker exceeds $40,000 a year, pay has limited impact on the level of satisfied workers.

Corporate social responsibility also plays a role in job satisfaction, especially for millennials. In general, if an employee’s personal values fit with those of the organization, the employee is usually satisfied.

Impact of Job Dissatisfaction

Exit: directs behavior toward leaving the organization

Voice: includes actively and constructively attempting to improve conditions

Loyalty: passively but optimistically waiting for conditions to improve

Neglect: passively allows conditions to worsen

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.

Counterproductive Work Behavior

CWB: deviant behavior in the workplace, or simply withdrawal behavior

Job dissatisfaction predicts CWB

Managers can try to mitigate CWB, using techniques such as polling to find out about employee attitudes. Avoiding mismatches between the job and the employee’s abilities and values should increase job satisfaction.

The Benefits of Satisfaction

Better job and organizational performance

Better organizational citizenship behaviors

(OCB – Discretionary behaviors that contribute to organizational effectiveness but are not part of employees’ formal job description)

Greater levels of customer satisfaction

Generally lower absenteeism and turnover

Decreased instances of workplace deviance

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.

Satisfied workers tend to have stronger performance and are more in tune with the organization’s mission and goals. As a result of that they tend to serve customers better, which translates into strong customer satisfaction.

Satisfied workers 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.

Implications for Managers

Pay attention to your employees’ job satisfaction levels as determinants of their performance, turnover, absenteeism, and withdrawal behaviors.

Measure employee job attitudes objectively and at regular intervals in order to determine how employees are reacting to their work.

To raise employee satisfaction, evaluate the fit between the employee’s work interests and the intrinsic parts of the job to create work that is challenging and interesting to the individual.

Consider the fact that high pay alone is unlikely to create a satisfying work environment.

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.