Industrial/Organizational Psychology: Job Attitudes

Introduction to Job Attitudes

• General Statistics on Job Satisfaction:

  • Most people ($67\%$) report being highly satisfied with their co-workers.

  • A smaller percentage ($51\%$) report being highly satisfied with their job overall.

• Impact of Job Attitudes:

  • Job attitudes directly affect work behaviors.

  • They also influence an individual's satisfaction with their nonwork life.

Theory of Planned Behavior

• Core Principle: Attitudes and subjective norms affect intentions, which in turn affect actual behaviors.

• Subjective Norm: Defined as the perceived social pressures an individual feels to perform or not perform a specific behavior.

• Perceived Behavioral Control: An individual's belief regarding how easy or difficult the performance of a specific behavior is likely to be.

Job Satisfaction: Nature and Antecedents

• Definition: Job satisfaction is a positive emotional state resulting from the evaluation of one’s job or job experiences.

• Impact Areas: It significantly impacts performance, withdrawal behaviors (e.g., quitting), and counterproductive work behaviors (CWB).

• Antecedents (Causes) of Job Satisfaction:

  • Job Characteristics: The specific structure of the job and the resources or experiences it provides.

  • Individual/Personal Characteristics: Factors including genetics and affective dispositions (an individual's natural tendency to be positive or negative).

  • Social Factors: Internal relationships within the workplace, levels of task ambiguity (clarity of duties), and perceived organizational justice.

  • Growth Opportunities: Tangible rewards such as pay and opportunities for promotions.

Measuring Job Satisfaction

• Job Descriptive Index (JDI):

  • Measures five specific dimensions plus overall (general) satisfaction.

  • Scoring Method: Respondents write "1" for Yes, "2" for No, or "3" for "?".

  • Dimensions measured include:

    • Work on Present Job: Descriptors like fascinating, routine, satisfying, boring.

    • Present Pay: Descriptors like income adequate for normal expenses, fair, comfortable, bad.

    • Coworkers: Descriptors like stimulating, boring, slow, helpful.

    • Opportunities for Promotion: Descriptors like good opportunities, somewhat limited, promotion on ability, dead-end job.

    • Supervision: Descriptors like supportive, hard to please, impolite, praises good work.

    • Job in General: Descriptors like pleasant, bad, great, worthwhile.

• Job Diagnostic Survey (JDS):

  • Measures five specific dimensions using a 7-point Likert scale (ranging from 1 = Extremely Dissatisfied to 7 = Extremely Satisfied).

  • Dimensions: Pay (including fringe benefits), Security, Social (chance to know others), Supervisory (support and guidance), and Growth (personal development).

• Faces Scale:

  • A nonverbal measurement tool consisting of a series of faces ranging from very happy to very sad.

  • Advantage: Easier for employees who are verbally unskilled or have language barriers to complete.

  • Typically uses a scale from 1 to 10 to express the current level of job satisfaction regarding tasks, compensation, supervision, and growth.

• Qualitative Methods:

  • Open-ended comments where employees describe their levels of satisfaction with supervisors and coworkers in their own words.

  • Downside: Very labor-intensive to score manually, though AI is increasingly used to facilitate analysis.

• Experience Sampling Method (ESM):

  • Involves real-time reports of employee perceptions collected through smartphones and mobile devices while they are actually at work.

Factors and Correlations in Job Satisfaction

• Remote Work:

  • Based on research by Golden (2006), partial remote work serves to improve job satisfaction and significantly reduces work-family conflict.

• Pay and Satisfaction (Judge et al., 2010):

  • A meta-analysis of 92 studies found that pay is only weakly correlated with overall job satisfaction ($r = .15$) and pay satisfaction ($r = .23$).

  • These findings showed minimal differences across different countries and professions.

• Performance (Harrison et al., 2006):

  • The correlation between job satisfaction and productivity/performance is approximately $r = .60$.

  • This relationship tends to be stronger in individualistic cultures.

  • Job satisfaction is a reliable predictor of Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB).

Consequences: Withdrawal and Counterproductive Behaviors

• Counterproductive Work Behaviors (CWB):

  • Examples: Arson, blackmail, bribery, cyberloafing, sabotage, theft, fraud, bullying, and violence.

  • Predictors: Better predicted by feelings of anger. Low conscientiousness in workers is a high-risk factor for CWB.

• Withdrawal Behaviors:

  • Examples: Absenteeism, tardiness, and turnover.

  • Predictors: Better predicted by feelings of boredom and depression.

• Absenteeism:

  • Financial Impact: Costs companies approximately $22\%$ of the total company payroll.

  • Causes: Only $33\%$ of unscheduled time off is actually due to personal illness.

  • Steers and Rhodes (1978) developed a influential model for understanding absenteeism.

• Tardiness (Lateness):

  • Chronic tardiness is predicted by job satisfaction, with a correlation of $r = -.39$ (Blau, 1994).

• Turnover:

  • Replacement costs are estimated at 6 to 12 months of an employee's salary.

  • Post-COVID trends shows greater levels of resignation (Xu et al., 2023).

  • Two main antecedents: Perceived ease of movement and Perceived desirability of movement.

  • Correlation with job satisfaction is modest ($r = -.25$).

  • Crucially, the change in satisfaction levels over time is more predictive of turnover than the current static level of satisfaction.

Organizational Commitment

• Definition: An employee's identification with, attachment to, and involvement in a specific organization.

• Relationship to Job Satisfaction: Broader than satisfaction, with a moderate correlation ($r = .30$ to $.40$). Commitment is often considered more stable over time.

• Components (Meyer and Allen):

  1. Affective Commitment: Emotional attachment to the organization.

  2. Continuance Commitment: Based on the "sunk costs" associated with leaving (what the employee would lose).

  3. Normative Commitment: A feeling of moral obligation to continue employment.

• Antecedents of Commitment:

  • Organizational Mechanisms: Socialization, use of logos/insignias, programs for family, newsletters, and reward systems (e.g., years of service awards, CSR events).

  • Individual Characteristics: Age ($r = .15$) and Tenure/Time on the job ($r = .16$).

  • Social Factors: Relationships with coworkers, participation and social interaction, role variables (avoiding role ambiguity so employees know what is expected), and organizational justice.

• Consequences of Commitment:

  • Performance: Correlation of $r = .20$. It is a stronger predictor of OCBs (helping behaviors).

  • Withdrawal: Actual turnover ($r = -.20$), absence ($r = -.20$), and very strong negative correlations with intentions to leave ($r = -.40$).

Job Engagement and Work Centrality

• Job Engagement: The extent to which an employee finds their job stimulating and energetic.

• Engagement Trends (Gallup):

  • In 2023, approximately $32\%$ of U.S. employees were "Engaged."

  • Approximately $17\%$ were "Actively disengaged."

• Workaholic: An individual who enjoys the act of working, is obsessed with work, and devotes personal time to work at the expense of other important life roles, leading to poor health and imbalance.

• Work Centrality: The degree of importance work holds in an employee's life.

  • Influenced by early socialization from family and peers.

  • Affective commitment increases work centrality.

  • Positively related to salary level, number of promotions, and overall career satisfaction.

• Perceived Organizational Support (POS): The belief that the organization values contributions and cares about well-being.

  • Antecedents: Fair procedures, supervisor support, favorable rewards.

  • Consequences: Increased commitment and performance; reduced withdrawal.

Emotions and Acting in the Workplace

• Emotion Regulation: Monitoring and modifying emotions.

  • Amplification: Faking or exaggerating pleasant emotions.

  • Suppression: Hiding felt emotions like anger or jealousy (leads to job dissatisfaction).

• Emotional Labor: The effort and control required to express organizationally desired emotions during interactions.

• Emotional Dissonance: Occurs when true feelings differ from projected emotions. This predicts high stress and burnout.

• Types of Acting:

  • Surface Acting: Faking emotions by manipulating facial muscles without changing thoughts/feelings.

  • Deep Acting: Modifying inner feelings to match required outward emotions.

• Hülsheger et al. (2015): Trained German hairdressers in deep acting. Results showed that training increased tips, though inauthentic displays generally lead to less positive impressions long-term.

• Authenticity Study (Grandey et al., 2005): In a hotel check-in simulation, participants reported significantly higher satisfaction when interacting with a worker using authentic (deep) acting compared to inauthentic (surface) acting.

Factors of Happiness and Proactive Behavior

• The Mills College Study (Harker & Keltner, 2001):

  • Analyzed the senior class photos (1960s) of 141 women.

  • Smiles were coded as Duchenne (genuine) or non-Duchenne (forced).

  • Results: Women with genuine smiles in their 20s reported more stable/happy marriages, higher personal well-being, and better mental/physical health when contacted at ages 27, 43, and 52.

• The "Too Much Happiness" Effect (Lam et al., 2013):

  • People with either very low or very high levels of happiness are less likely to engage in proactive behaviors (e.g., making recommendations for improvement, speaking up).

    • Low Positive Affect: The individual does not care enough to try to change things.

    • High Positive Affect: The individual thinks everything is already perfect.

  • Conclusion: Moderate levels of positive affect result in the highest degree of prosocial and proactive behaviors.