ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

CHAPTER 2: ATTITUDE AND JOB SATISFACTION

I/ ATTITUDE.
- Attitudes are evaluative statements – either favorable or unfavorable – about objects, people, or events.
They reflect how we feel about something.
- In order to fully understand attitudes, we must consider their fundamental properties or components.
1. Three main components of attitude.
- The cognitive component of an attitude – a description of or belief in the way things are.
- The affective component is the emotional or feeling segment of an attitude.
- The behavioral component of an attitude describes an intention to behave in a certain way toward
someone or something.
- Viewing attitudes as having three components - cognition, affect, and behavior – is helpful in
understanding their complexity and the potential relationship between attitudes and behavior.
- Example:

2. Does behavior always follow from attitude? – Cognitive dissonance.

- Leon Festinger – No, the reverse is sometimes true!
- Festinger proposed that cases of attitude following behavior illustrate the effects of cognitive dissonance
– any incompatibility an individual might perceive between two or more attitudes or between behavior and
attitudes. Festinger argued that any form of inconsistency is uncomfortable and that individuals will therefore
attempt to reduce it. They will seek a stable state, which is a minimum of dissonance.
- Festinger proposed that the desire to reduce dissonance depends on moderating factors, including the
importance of the elements creating it and the degree of influence we believe we have over them. Individuals
will be more motivated to reduce dissonance when the attitudes or behavior are important or when they believe
the dissonance is due to something they can control. A third factor is the rewards of dissonance; high rewards
accompanying high dissonance tend to reduce the tension inherent in the dissonance.
3. Moderating variables.
- The importance of the attitude: Important attitudes reflect our fundamental values, self-interest, or
identification with individuals or groups we value. These attitudes tend to show a strong relationship to our
behavior.
 - Its correspondence to behavior: Specific attitudes tends to predict specific behaviors, whereas general
attitudes tend to best predict general behaviors.
- Its accessibility: Attitudes that our memories can easily access are more likely to predict our behavior.
Interestingly, you are more likely to remember attitudes you frequently express. So, the more you talk about
your attitude on a subject, the more likely you are to remember it, and the more likely it is to shape your
behavior.
- The presence of social pressure: Discrepancies between attitudes and behavior tend to occur when social
pressures to behave in certain ways hold exceptional power, as in most organizations.
- Direct experience with the attitude: The attitude – behavior relationship is likely to be much stronger if
an attitude refers to something with which we have direct personal experience.
4. Major job attitudes.
- When people speak of employee attitudes, they usually mean job satisfaction, which describes a positive
feeling about a job, resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics. A person with a high level of job
satisfaction holds positive feelings about his or her job, while a person with a low level holds negative feelings.
- Related to job satisfaction is job involvement, which measures the degree to which people identify
psychologically with their job and consider their perceived performance level important to self-worth.
Employees with a high level of job involvement strongly identify with and really care about the kind of work
they do.
- Another closely related concept is psychological empowerment, employees’ beliefs in the degree to
which they influence their work environment, their competence, the meaningfulness of their job, and their
perceived autonomy.
- Organizational commitment is the degree to which an employee identifies with a particular
organization and its goals and wishes to maintain membership in the organization. Most research has focused
on emotional attachment to an organization and belief in its values as the “gold standard” for employee
commitment.
- Perceived organizational support (POS) is the degree to which employees believe the organization
values their contribution and cares about their well-being (for example, an employee believes his organization
would accommodate him if he had a childcare problem or would forgive an honest mistake on his part).
- A new concept is employee engagement, an individual’s involvement with, satisfaction with, and
enthusiasm for, the work she does.
II/ JOB SATISFACTION.
- Job satisfaction is a positive feeling about a job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics.
- 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 nature of the work, supervision, present pay, promotion opportunities, and relationships with
co-workers. Respondents rate these on a standardized scale, and researchers add the ratings to create an overall
job satisfaction score.
 Compare two methods: This is one of those rare instances in which simplicity seems to work as well as
complexity, making one method essentially as valid as the other. The best explanation is that the concept of job
satisfaction is so broad a single question captures its essence. The summation of job facets may also leave out
some important data. Both methods are helpful. The single global rating method is not very time consuming,
thus freeing time for other tasks, and the summation of job facets helps managers zero in on problems and deal
with them faster and more accurately.
1. How satisfied are people in their jobs?
- Research also shows satisfaction levels vary a lot, depending on which facet of job satisfaction you are
talking about. People have typically been more satisfied with their jobs overall, with the work itself, and with
their supervisors and co-workers than they have been with their pay and with promotion opportunities.
 2. What cause job satisfaction?
- There is not much relationship between amount of pay and job satisfaction. Pay influences job
satisfaction only to a point.
- Personality also plays a role. Research has shown that people who have positive core self-evaluations—
who believe in their inner worth and basic competence—are more satisfied with their jobs than those with
negative core self-evaluations.

Exit Voice
Behavior directed Active and
toward leaving the constructive attempts
organization to improve conditions

Neglect Loyalty
Allowing conditions Passively waiting for
to worsen conditions to
improve

3. Outcome of job satisfaction.

- Job performance: Happy workers are more likely to be productive workers.
- Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB): It seems logical to assume job satisfaction should be a
major determinant of an employee’s organizational citizenship behavior. Satisfied employees would seem more
likely to talk positively about the organization, help others, and go beyond the normal expectations in their job,
perhaps because they want to reciprocate their positive experiences.
- Customer satisfaction: Employees in service jobs often interact with customers. Satisfied employees
increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Absenteeism: We find a consistent negative relationship between satisfaction and absenteeism, but it is
moderate to weak. While it certainly makes sense that dissatisfied employees are more likely to miss work,
other factors affect the relationship.
- Turnover: The relationship between job satisfaction and turnover is stronger than between satisfaction
and absenteeism. The satisfaction - turnover relationship also is affected by alternative job prospects.
- Workplace deviance: Job dissatisfaction and antagonistic relationships with co-workers predict a variety
of behaviors organizations find undesirable, including unionization attempts, substance abuse, stealing at work,
undue socializing, and tardiness.
III/ SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGERS.
- Satisfied and committed employees have lower rates of turnover, absenteeism, and withdrawal behaviors.
They also perform better on the job. Given that managers want to keep resignations and absences down –
especially among their most productive employees – they will want to do things that generate positive job
attitudes.
- Managers will also want to measure job attitudes effectively so they can tell how employees are reacting
to their work. As one review put it, “A sound measurement of overall job attitude is one of the most useful
pieces of information an organization can have about its employees.”
- The most important thing managers can do to raise employee satisfaction is focus on the intrinsic parts of
the job, such as making the work challenging and interesting.
 - Although paying employees poorly will likely not attract high-quality employees to the organization or
keep high performers, managers should realize that high pay alone is unlikely to create a satisfying work
environment.