Question

Locate 2 articles related to individual human behavior in the workplace:attitudes and job satisfaction in organizations and summarize and discuss.

Be sure to include reference citations for support.

Answer 1

Workplace attitude refers to a persons opinions, feelings and beliefs about the workplace. The workplace attitude that an employee holds is an important predictor of whether they stay in the organisation or not, and also their involvement within the organisation. According to Fisbein and Ajzen, 1975 attitude is a positive or negative feeling or mental state of readiness, learned and organized through experience th at exerts specific influence on a person‟s response to people, objects and situations. This definition of attitude has certain implications for managers. First, attitudes are learned. Second, attitudes provide emotional basis of one‟s interpersonal relations and identification with others, Third, attitudes define one‟s predispositions toward given aspects of the world. And fourth, attitudes are organized and are closed to the core of personality. Some attitudes are persistent and enduring; yet, like each of the psychological variables, attitudes are subject to change. A study conducted by Harter and colleagues in 2002, found that positive workplace attitudes are related to positive organisation-level outcomes, such as profitability,customer satisfaction and loyalty, and safety in the workplace. Since the work attitudes might give us clues as to the employee turnover, employee performance, employee engagement, tracking these attitudes is a helpful step for companies. One of the most important workplace attitude that has gained widespread attention of the OB researchers and management consultants is Job Satisfaction.

Job Satisfaction has been defined by Locke, 1976 as "a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job or job experiences." According to Bernstein & Nash, 2008, OB satisfaction has emotional, cognitive, and behavioral components . The emotional component refers to job-related feelings such as boredom, anxiety, acknowledgement and excitement. The cognitive component of job satisfaction pertains to beliefs regarding one's job whether it is respectable, mentally demanding / challenging and rewarding. Finally, the behavioral component includes people's actions in relation to their work such as tardiness, working late, faking illness in order to avoid work.

I will be summarising two articles on job satisfaction one by one. The first article, I am reviewing is an article by Lise M. Saari and Timothy A. Judge, titled-Employee Attitudes and Job Satisfaction. The article talks about three important but often ignored areas of HR practice in the area of employee attitudes, namely-1) The causes of employee attitudes, 2) The consequence of positive or negative job satisfaction and, 3) ways of measuring and influencing employee attitudes. I will be focusing on only the first two as they seem relevant to the question at hand.

Dispositional influences, Cultural influences, and Work Situation influences:Under the first gap between HR practitioners and the scientific enquiry related to the cause of employee attitudes, the authors identify three important causes.The authors have cited several researches to show the impact a persons personality and disposition has on the employees attitudes. One such study cited is by Staw and Ross, 1985. The authors argue that although the impact of disposition on workplace attitude is well acknowledged, the understanding of the disposition-job satisfaction relationship is still unclear. For this purpose they cite two research studies conducted by Weiss and Cropanzano (1996) and Judge & Bono, 2001; focusing of the underlying psychological mechanisms for the same. Therefore the researchers argue that since an important relation exists between the two, its essential that the organisations use sound selection methods to ensure the employee-job fit. Under Cultural influences the authors talk about the impact of the culture of the employees country is an important determinant of their workplace attitude and for the same they cite the Hofstede Cultural Taxonomies and their impact on employee attitudes and the importance of understanding the same because of the growing globalisation cross-national boundary work. In the article the authors argue that one of the most important areas of the work situation to in- fluence job satisfaction—the work itself—is often overlooked by practitioners when addressing job satisfaction. The nature of work which includes the job challenge, autonomy, variety, and scope predicts job satisfaction and other employee outcomes. They cite a study done by Kovach in 1995 examining the importance of job attributes, employees ranked interesting work as the most important job attribute and good wages ranked fifth, whereas when it came to what managers thought em- ployees wanted, good wages ranked first while interesting work ranked fifth.

b) The consequence of positive or negative employee satisfaction: Under this the authors have focused upon the relationship between Job Satisfaction and Job Performance talking about the Hawthorne Studies as as part of the history in the same area and citing several studies which have a found a strong correlation between the two variables. The second relationship focused upon is that of the Job Satisfaction and Life Satisfaction. The authors have talked about three kinds of relationships emneshed within this larger relationship: (1) spillover, where job experiences spill over into nonwork life and vice versa; (2) compensation, where an individual seeks to compen- sate for a dissatisfying job by seeking fulfillment and happiness in his or her nonwork life and vice versa, (3) segmentation, where job and life experiences are separated and have little to do with one another. They have largely focused on the spillover model, citing studies (Judge and Watanabe, 1994) which have shown, that since job is a significant part of one’s life, one’s job experiences spill over into one’s life and vice-versa. They make an important conlusion based on this wherein they state that continuing to take actions to address low job satisfaction is not only important for organizational effectiveness, but by not doing so, organizations can cause spillover of employees’ low job satisfaction into their life satisfaction and well-being. The third relationship studied is between Job Satisfaction and Withdrawal Behaviors. The authors citing several researches argue for an important corelation between job satisfaction and withdrawal behaviors and state that using the methods of statistically measuring the financial impact of employee attitudes on organisation can be a powerful way for practitioners to reveal the costs of low job satisfaction and the value of improved employee attitudes on such outcomes as absenteeism and retention.

The authors conclude by offering certain suggestions on closing the gap between research and practice such as by becoming more informed of the knowledge in the area, improving the knowledge of basic statistics, applying the ROI (Return on Investement principle) to evalaute the practies discussed in the paper.

The second article that I am going to disucss is a research done by Kevin Baker, titiled Antecedents And Consequences Of Job Satisfaction: Testing A Comprehensive Model Using Integrated Methodology. The study examined the key antecedents and two important consequences of job satisfaction in a comprehensive framework by utilizing integrated methodologies, which involves the integration of meta-analytic techniques with structural equation modeliing. The key points of the article are summarised as follow:

1) Antecedents: The key antecedents studied in the present research are a result of the various theories which have been postulated over the years to study job satisfaction and workplace attitude. These include the Task Characteristics Approach, the Social Information Processing Approach or the Situational Approach and the Dispositional Approach. The first perspective proposes that the task characteristics are related to employee attitudes and describes jobs by the five perceived core dimensions of autonomy, feedback from the job, job variety, task identity, and task significance (Hackman & Oldham, 1975). The second perspective focuses upon how job attitudes are determined by social cues proce ssed from the work environment. Finally the third perspective as proposed by Staw and Ross, 1985 states that the employees possess relatively stable unobservable mental states such as needs or attitudes that will impact their perceptions and behavior at the workplace.

2) Consequences of Job Satisfaction: the two consequences of job satisfaction that have been stressed upon are Absenteeism and Turnover. The reserchers have cited several precedent studies which have demonstrated a relation between the two. The authors make an important point of the Progression of Withdrawal Behaviors. The first viewpoint indicated that withdrawal behaviors were progressive (Herzberg et al., 1957). The researchers argue that individuals who leave the organization progressed from absenteeism to separation. This implies a positive relationship between absenteeism and turnover.

3) Methods and Analysis: The study investigates the antecedents and consequences of job satisfaction by combining effect sizes across samples and integrating the results into a structural equation mode.

4) Measurement Instruments: The following measurement instruments were used:

Task characteristics were measured with three instruments with convergent validity (Brief & Aldag, 1978) including Yale Job Inventory or YJI (Hackman & Lawler, 1971), Job Diagnostic Survey or JDS (Hackman & Oldham, 1975), and Job Characteristics Inventory or JCI (Sims, Szilagyi, & Keller, 1976).

Leader consideration and initiating structure measurement instruments included Fleishman's Supervisory Behavioral Description Questionnaire (Fleishman, 1953) and the Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire Form XII (Stogdill, 1963).

Motivation is assessed by the JDS measure (Hackman & Oldham, 1975) and Yale Job Inventory or YJI (Hackma n & Lawler, 1971). Need for achievement was measured by the Manifest Needs Questionnaire or MNQ (Steers & Braunstein, 1976).

The Consequences of job satisfaction, Absenteeism was measured by absence frequency data. Finally, turnover measures were corrected for range restriction.   

5) Hypotheses: The study had the following hypothesis-

Hypothesis 1: There is a significant direct effect from task characteristics, social information processing, and dispos i tional factors to job satisfaction.   

Hypothesis 2: The direct effects from the dispositional variables are greater than the direct effects from task characteristics and leadership factors.   

Hypothesis 3: Job satisfaction has a direct effect (DE) on absenteeism.

Hypothesis 4: Job satisfaction has only an indirect effect (IE) on turnover through absenteeism.   

Hypothesis 5: Absenteeism has a significant direct effect (DE) on turnover reflecting a withdrawal progression.

6) Results: Under the first hypothesis job variety task identity were significant antecedents to job satisfaction. There was also evidence for the social information processing approach in that leader consideration was a significant antecedent to job satisfaction. There was also significant and strong direct impact from both need for achievement and motivation as predictors of satisfaction. Under the second hypothesis   dispositional variables had the strongest impact of any of the variables on job satisfaction. The third and the fourth hypotheses however werent confirmed in the study, as it was found that  Job satisfaction did not have a significant direct effect on absenteeism. Consequently, its indirect effects on turnover were not significant. Only two variables were significant predictors of absenteeism across samples. Leader initiating structure (γ * = - .10, t = - .21, p < .05) and motivation (γ * = - .23, t = - 4.42, p < .05) had significant standardized path coefficients. The final hypothesis of the study was also confirmed in the study.  Absenteeism had a significant positive direct effect on turnover thereby providing evidence to a progression of withdrawal behaviors.

The two studies summarised above have been used in order to understand the relationship between the work attitudes and the important work attitude of job satisfaction. Also, the first article provides a theoretical understanding of the antecedents and cinsquences of Job satisfaction, the second article provides research evidence for the same.