Chapter 3 - Job Attitudes Notes

Job Attitudes

Learning Objectives

  • 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 four outcomes of job satisfaction.
  • Identify four employee responses to job dissatisfaction.

Employability Skills Matrix

  • Critical Thinking & Creativity
  • Communication
  • Collaboration
  • Self-Management
  • Social Responsibility
  • Leadership
  • Career Management

Attitudes

  • Attitudes are judgments or evaluative statements—either favorable or unfavorable—about objects, people, or events, reflecting how we feel about something.
  • Attitudes are complex, with underlying reasons that are often complicated.
  • Accountants who perceive their jobs as challenging, having great benefits, and supportive management are more likely to be happier.
  • An individual's satisfaction, commitment, and other attitudes toward their employer are significant considerations in the workplace.
    • When people like their job, they do it well and are more willing to stay.
    • In order to understand attitudes, one must consider their fundamental properties or components.

Components of Attitudes

  • Typically, researchers assume that attitudes have three components: cognition, affect, and behavior.
    • Cognitive component: The opinion or belief segment of an attitude; an opinion or belief about the attitude target (e.g., your supervisor).
    • Affective component: The emotional or feeling segment of an attitude.
    • Behavioral component: An intention to behave a certain way toward someone or something.
  • Viewing attitudes as having the three components, affect, behavior, and cognition (the ABCs of attitudes), helps us understand their complexity and the potential relationship between attitudes and behavior.
    • Cognition and affect are intertwined.
Exhibit 3-1: The Components of an Attitude
  • Cognitive = evaluation
    • Example: "My supervisor gave a promotion to a coworker who deserved it less than I did. My supervisor is unfair."
  • Affective = feeling
    • Example: "I dislike my supervisor!"
  • Behavioral = action
    • Example: "I'm looking for other work; I've complained about my supervisor to anyone who would listen."
  • Cognition, affect, and behavior are closely related.

Attitudes and Behavior

  • Attitudes are important for their behavioral component within organizations.
    • An accountant's belief that they have no attachment to their firm and could get better opportunities elsewhere could lead to them leaving their job.
    • Understanding how commitment is formed and changed is essential for managers wanting to reduce turnover.
  • Research supports the idea that attitudes predict future behavior.
  • Several characteristics change the nature of the attitudes-behavior relationship:
    • The importance of the attitude.
    • Its correspondence to behavior.
    • Its accessibility.
    • The presence of social pressures; and
    • Whether a person has direct experience with the attitude.
  • Important attitudes reflect our fundamental values, self-interest, or identification with individuals or groups we value and tend to show a strong relationship with our behavior.
  • Discrepancies between attitudes and behaviors tend to occur when social pressures to behave in certain ways hold exceptional power (common in organizations).
  • Attitudes that our memories can easily access are more likely to predict our behavior.
  • The attitude-behavior relationship is much stronger if attitudes refer to something we have directly experienced.
  • Advancements in machine learning have enabled researchers to further understand the attitude-behavior relationship.
  • Behavior might predict future attitudes in some instances.
    • People change what they say, so it doesn't contradict what they do.
    • Management and harassers minimize, ignore, or justify cases of attitude following behavior.
  • Cases of attitude following behavior illustrate the effects of cognitive dissonance, contradictions individuals might perceive between their attitudes and their behavior.
  • People seek a stable consistency within their attitudes and between their attitudes and their behavior.
  • Any form of inconsistency is uncomfortable, and individuals attempt to reduce or minimize it.
  • When there is dissonance, people alter their attitudes or behavior to minimize the dissonance or develop a rationalization for the discrepancy.
  • The desire to reduce dissonance depends on three factors:
    • The importance of the elements creating dissonance.
    • The degree of influence we believe we have over those elements.
    • The rewards of dissonance.
  • 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

  • Organizational behavior (OB) focuses on a narrow set of attitudes that form positive or negative evaluations that employees hold about their work.
  • Organizational identification: The extent to which employees define themselves by the same characteristics that define their organization, forming a basis for engendered attitudes and behaviors.
  • Most research has looked at three attitudes: job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment.
  • Other important attitudes include Perceived Organizational Support (POS) and Employee Engagement.
  • OB is not solely focused on the link between positive job attitudes and desirable behaviors; negative job attitudes and their outcomes are just as important.
  • Organizational identification can lead employees to behave unethically, experience reduced performance, and perpetuate conflict between people.
  • Negative job attitudes and their outcomes are just as important.
Ethical Choice: Office Talk
  • Office conversations can help employees process information and find solutions to problems but can also be damaging.
  • More than 60% of professional employees surveyed encounter individuals who frequently share too much about themselves.
  • Oversharers can be strong contributors, pushing other employees to work harder and contributing to teamwork when they share personal stories related to organizational goals.
  • Some people are often "the first people to become offended" when it comes to office talk if they think the organization is making wrong decisions and can be top-performing employees.
  • Venting frustrations helps restore a positive attitude to keep them high-performing, and can also build camaraderie.
  • Conversations can quickly go awry if you do not pay attention to the situational norms, your role, the content, and your engagement with the conversation.
  • There are no clear guidelines for acceptable office talk, so monitor own conversations and become aware of venting/oversharing.
Job Satisfaction and Job Involvement
  • 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, whereas a person with low satisfaction holds negative feelings.
  • Job Involvement: The degree to which a person identifies with a job, actively participates in it, and considers performance important to self-worth.
    • Employees with high job involvement strongly identify with and care about the kind of work they do and tend to be more satisfied with their jobs.
  • Psychological empowerment: Employees' belief in the degree to which they affect their work environment, competence, meaningfulness of their job, and autonomy.
    • The more "empowered" employees are, the more likely they are to perform well, engage in organizational citizenship behaviors, and be creative (less likely to leave).
  • Psychological empowerment strongly predicts job attitudes and strain, moderately predicts performance behaviors.
Organizational Commitment
  • Organizational commitment: The degree to which an employee identifies with a particular organization and its goals and wishes to maintain membership in the organization.
  • Emotional attachment to an organization and belief in its values are the gold standard for employee commitment.
  • Traditionally, commitment is comprised of three components: affective, normative, and continuance commitment.
    • Affective commitment: Emotional attachment to and involvement in an organization.
    • Normative commitment: The sense of obligation an employee feels to an organization.
    • Continuance commitment: Employees' consideration of the costs of leaving an organization and a drive to continue as an employee.
  • Committed employees will be less likely to engage in work withdrawal even if they are dissatisfied.
  • Affective commitment tends to be most important for outcomes beyond turnover and retention, like attendance, performance, and organizational citizenship behavior.
Perceived Organizational Support
  • Perceived organizational support (POS): The degree to which employees believe that the organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being.
  • People perceive their organizations as supportive when they are treated fairly, have a high-quality relationship with the organization, and perceive that the organization's practices are supportive, developmental, and fair.
  • POS is important in countries where the power distance is lower.
  • Power Distance: The degree to which people in a country accept that power is distributed unequally in institutions and organizations.
    • In low-power-distance countries like the United States, people are more likely to view work as an exchange than a moral obligation.
Employee Engagement
  • Employee engagement: The degree of enthusiasm an employee feels for the job; something like "devotion" or giving your "heart and soul" to your work.
  • Highly engaged employees have a passion for their work and feel a deep connection to their companies.
  • Disengaged employees have essentially checked out.
    • One study suggests that organizations can lose up to 550550 billion annually in lost productivity from disengaged employees.
  • Reviews suggest that employee engagement is moderately related to employee and organizational performance.
  • A study of nearly 8,000 business units in 36 companies found that teams whose employees reported high engagement levels achieved higher customer satisfaction levels, were more productive, brought in higher profits, and experienced lower levels of turnover and accidents than at other business units.
  • Job engagement was critical for reducing work withdrawal, increasing performance, and heightened safety compliance following the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China.
  • Employee-focused interventions that focused on increasing employees' autonomy and resiliency, reduced job demands or made them easier to cope with, or contributed to employees' development (e.g., feedback, learning) were found to be particularly useful at improving employee engagement.
  • Organizations can improve engagement by enhancing organizational practices (e.g., training), work attributes (e.g., clarity in roles, autonomy), and supervisor support.

Job Attitudes in the Gig Economy

  • Job attitudes in the gig economy are influenced by the stability of work, characteristics of temporary assignments, and the gig workers themselves.
  • Personally fulfilling work for gig workers in which they develop socioemotional relationships with clients and client organizations is critical.
  • Gig workers tend to be more satisfied and more committed when they perceive employment to be stable and believe they can gain employment elsewhere fairly easily.
  • One meta-analysis of hundreds of thousands of workers suggests that gig workers' job satisfaction is only slightly less than permanent workers.
  • Temporary agency workers do experience substantial decrements in job satisfaction compared with other workers (including other gig workers).

Job Satisfaction

  • Job satisfaction is one of the most critical job attitudes and predicts several important business outcomes.
  • Two popular approaches to measure job satisfaction:
    • Single global rating: 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."
    • Summation of job facets: 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 each of these on a standardized scale and their ratings are added to create an overall job satisfaction score.
  • The single global rating method is not very time-consuming, while the summation of job facets helps managers zero in on problems and deal with them faster and more accurately.
How Satisfied Are People in Their Jobs?
  • Job satisfaction levels can remain relatively consistent over time.
  • Economic conditions tend to influence job satisfaction rates.
  • Job satisfaction rates tend to vary in different cultures worldwide.
  • People have typically been more satisfied with their jobs overall, the work itself, and their supervisors and coworkers than they have been with their pay and promotion opportunities.
  • White employees tend to be slightly more satisfied than Black employees in general, especially in more complex jobs.
  • Average job satisfaction levels vary by country.
What Causes Job Satisfaction?
  • 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.
  • Toxic work environments lead to dissatisfied employees.
  • The quality of exchange between leaders and their employees is more strongly related to job satisfaction in more individualistic cultures than in more collectivistic cultures.
  • Fitting in with your organization and job matters more in North America, whereas fitting in with your team or supervisor matters more in East Asia.
  • Managers would do well to make sure the job conditions are satisfying enough to make employees happy.
  • 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.
  • Intelligent people tend to be more satisfied with their jobs, primarily because they seek out complex jobs that satisfy their intellectual curiosity.
  • Fit between the person and the job matters.
Pay
  • Income does correlate with job satisfaction and overall happiness for many people, and people do experience decrements in job satisfaction when they detect discrepancies with others.
  • The effect (of both pay level and discrepancies with others) can be smaller once an individual reaches a standard level of comfortable living.
Outcomes of Job Satisfaction
  • Happy workers are more likely to be productive workers.
  • Individuals with higher job satisfaction perform better, and organizations with more satisfied employees tend to be more effective than those with fewer.

*Evidence suggests job satisfaction is moderately correlated with OCB; people who are more satisfied with their jobs are more likely to engage in citizenship behavior.

*Individuals who feel that their coworkers support them are also more likely to engage in helpful behaviors than those with antagonistic coworker relationships.

*Satisfied employees appear to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

*Therefore, it makes sense that our overall happiness depends in no small part on our happiness in our work (our job satisfaction).

The Impact of Job Dissatisfaction
  • The exit-voice-loyalty-neglect framework helps us understand the consequences of dissatisfaction.
    • Exit: Behavior directed toward leaving the organization, including looking for a new position or resigning.
    • Studying individual terminations and collective turnover measures the effects of this response to dissatisfaction.
    • Voice: Actively and constructively attempting to improve conditions, including suggesting improvements and discussing problems with superiors.
  • Loyalty: Passively but optimistically waiting for conditions to improve, including speaking up for the organization in the face of external criticism.
  • Neglect: Passively allowing conditions to worsen, including chronic absenteeism or lateness and reduced effort.
  • Exit and neglect behaviors are linked to performance variables such as productivity, absenteeism, and turnover.
Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB)
  • Counterproductive work behavior (CWB): Actions that actively damage the organization, including stealing, behaving aggressively toward coworkers, or being late or absent.
  • Generally, job dissatisfaction predicts CWB.
  • CWB can also be a response to abusive supervision from managers, which then increases the abuse, thus starting a vicious cycle.
  • Dissatisfied employees often choose one or more specific behaviors due to idiosyncratic factors.
Absenteeism
  • Unsatisfied employees tend to be absent more often, but the relationship is not very strong.
  • When numerous alternative jobs are available, dissatisfied employees have high absence rates, but when there are few alternatives, dissatisfied employees have the same (low) rate of absence as satisfied employees.
Turnover
  • The relationship between job satisfaction and turnover is stronger than between satisfaction and absenteeism.
  • Overall, a pattern of lowered job satisfaction is the best predictor of turnover.
  • This suggests that managers should consider job satisfaction (and turnover) patterns of coworkers when assigning workers to a new area.

Myth or Science? Happy Workers Means Happy Profits

  • Happy employees with higher job engagement are willing to work hard, make customers happy, and stay with the company--three factors that affect the bottom line in a big way.
  • It is just good business to treat others as we want to be treated in the workplace.

Managers Often "Don't Get It"

  • Many managers are unconcerned about employee job satisfaction.
  • Others overestimate how satisfied employees are, so they do not think there is a problem when there is.
  • Regular surveys can reduce gaps between what managers think employees feel and what they really feel.

Summary

  • Managers should be interested in their employees' attitudes because attitudes influence behavior and indicate potential problems.
  • Evidence strongly suggests that managers' efforts to improve employee attitudes will likely result in positive outcomes, including greater organizational effectiveness, higher customer satisfaction, and increased profits.

Implications for Managers

  • Of the major job attitudes—job satisfaction, job involvement, organizational commitment, POS, and employee engagement—remember that an employee's job satisfaction level is the best single predictor of behavior.
  • Pay attention to your employees' job satisfaction levels as determinants of their performance, turnover, absenteeism, and withdrawal behaviors.
  • Measure employee job attitudes at regular intervals to determine how employees are reacting to their work.
  • To raise employee satisfaction, evaluate the fit between each employee's work interests and the intrinsic parts of the job; then 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.