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Chapter 3
Attitudes and Job Satisfaction
Chapter Overview
This chapter examines attitudes, their link to behavior, and how
employees’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their jobs affects the workplace.
Chapter Objectives
After studying this chapter, the student should be able to:
PPT 3.2
2. Summarize the relationship between attitudes and behavior.
4. Define job satisfaction and show how we can measure it.
6. Identify four employee responses to dissatisfaction.
Suggested Lecture Outline
I. INTRODUCTION
A. In this chapter, we look at attitudes, their link to behavior, and how employees’
satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their jobs affects the workplace.
II. ATTITUDES
A. Attitudes: evaluative statements—either favorable or
unfavorable—concerning objects, people, or events. They
reflect how one feels about something.
1. Attitudes are complex and the rationale behind them may not be obvious. To
fully understand attitudes, we must explore their fundamental properties or
components.
B. What Are the Main Components of Attitudes?
1. There are three main components of attitudes (Exhibit 3-1):
a. Cognitive. The statement “My pay is low” is the cognitive
component of an attitude—a description of or belief in the way things are.
Exhibit 3.1
PPT 3.1
PPT 3.3
PPT 3.4
2) Research confirms the theory that employees who are committed are
less likely to engage in work withdrawal even if they are dissatisfied
1) Organizations are considered supportive when they:
2) Research suggests employees with strong POS perceptions are more
likely to have higher levels of organizational citizenship behaviors, lower
levels of tardiness, and better customer service.
1) Conditions that can increase engagement include:
2) Highly engaged employees have a passion for their work and feel a deep
3) The concept is relatively new and still generates active debate about its
usefulness.
4) Recent research has demonstrated that engagement is distinct from job
satisfaction and job involvement, and that it incrementally predicts job
behaviors after we take these traditional job attitudes into account.
g. Are These Job Attitudes Really All That Distinct?
1) If people feel deeply engaged by their job (high job involvement), isn’t it
probable they like it (high job satisfaction)? Won’t people who think
their organization is supportive (high perceived organizational support)
also feel committed to it (strong organizational commitment)?
(1) For example, the correlation between perceived organizational
support and affective commitment is very strong.
(3) Why is redundancy troubling? Because it is inefficient and
2) Although we OB researchers like proposing new attitudes, often we
haven’t been good at showing how they compare and contrast with each
other. Some people are predisposed to be positive or negative about
almost everything. Then 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.
III. JOB SATISFACTION
A. As mentioned earlier, this attitude is one of the oldest and most critical attitudes
examined in OB studies.
B. Measuring Job Satisfaction.
1. Our definition of job satisfaction—a positive feeling about
a job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics—is
2. There are two widely used approaches to measuring this attitude:
a. Single Global Rating Method. This method uses responses to a single
question about the job to determine job satisfaction. Surprisingly, this
3. Is one of these approaches superior? Intuitively, summing up responses to a
number of job factors seems likely to achieve a more accurate evaluation of job
satisfaction.
a. Research, however, doesn’t support the intuition. 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.
b. The best explanation is that the concept of job satisfaction is so broad a
single question captures its essence.
c. The summation of job facets may also leave out some important data. Both
methods are helpful.
d. The single global rating method isn’t 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.
C. How Satisfied Are People in Their Jobs? Research shows satisfaction levels vary a
1. As shown in Exhibit 3-2, people are, on average, satisfied with
Exhibit 3.2
PPT 3.8
2. However, they tend to be less satisfied with their pay and with promotion
opportunities.
3. It’s not really clear why people dislike their pay and promotion possibilities
more than other aspects of their jobs.
4. While the concept appears relevant across cultures, there are
still cultural differences in job satisfaction.
5. Exhibit 3-3 shows that Western cultures tend to have higher levels of job
negative emotions more than do Westerners.
D. What Causes Job Satisfaction?
1. Interesting jobs that provide training, variety,
independence, and control satisfy most employees.
2. Pay, once about a given level, does not increase satisfaction.
3. Job satisfaction is not just about job conditions. 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
1. There are consequences both when employees like their jobs and when they
dislike them.
2. The Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Neglect Framework. This model is helpful in
understanding the consequences of dissatisfaction. The framework as four
responses which differ from one another along two
dimensions: constructive/destructive and active/passive.
PPT 3.10
PPT 3.11
PPT 3.9
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K. Job Satisfaction and Workplace Deviance.
1. Workplace deviance, or employee withdrawal, can take many forms, including,
unionization attempts, substance abuse, theft, lollygagging, and tardiness.
3. Such deviance can be considered a cry for help, where workers wish for
increased job satisfaction but do not get it and “act out” in response.
4. Managers should attack the source of the problem—dissatisfaction—rather than
to try to control the different responses to that dissatisfaction.
L. Managers Often “Don’t Get It.”
1. While there is much evidence that job satisfaction can affect organizational
2. Job satisfaction must be a managerial priority and managers must measure it to
manage it.
IV. IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGERS
A. Managers should be interested in employees’ attitudes because
1. Individuals have many kinds of attitudes about their job.
2. Most employees are satisfied with their jobs, but when they
are not, a host of actions in response to the satisfaction might be expected.
3. Job satisfaction is related to organizational effectiveness.
V. Summary
A. Contrasted the three components of an attitude.
B. Summarized the relationship between attitudes and behavior.
Discussion Questions
1. Describe the three components of an attitude. Give an example for each.
PPT 3.14
PPT 3.15
2. What is the relationship between attitudes and behavior?
3. Compare and contrast the job attitudes discussed in this chapter.
Answer: Job satisfaction is how an employee feels about the job. Job involvement is
closely related to psychological empowerment, and describes how much a person
4. How can managers increase job satisfaction and what are the organizational
consequences when there are high or low levels of job satisfaction?
5. List and describe the four employee responses to dissatisfaction.
Answer: This involves the Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Neglect Framework. The framework
provides the four responses to employee dissatisfaction.
6. Is job satisfaction a global concept?
Answer: It appears to be. While the concept itself is global, there are still cultural
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Exercises
1. Self-analysis. What are your attitudes toward the workplace? How would you
describe your level of job satisfaction, and why? Be detailed in your analysis.
2. Web Crawling. Find and present an online article on job satisfaction in a country
other than the United States. What commonalities are exposed and what differences
are shown to exist?
3. Teamwork. In small groups meet and discuss attitudes. As a warm up, work
backward from behaviors you have evidenced in the past to what your attitude was
4. How Have Attitudes in the Work Environment Changed? The purpose of this
exercise is to explore the difference in work-related attitudes across generations.
The students will develop an interview instrument and use it to interview three to
five people who are clearly in different age categories (i.e., work cohorts).
a. Put students into small groups. In the group, brainstorm questions for a
short interview regarding job satisfaction and attitudes toward work.
b. As a class discusses the questions and ideas and narrows them to a list of
five to ten questions, something that could be administered in an oral
interview in thirty minutes.
c. Each group should assign one member to each of the following cohorts.
i. Workers who grew up influenced by the Great Depression and
entered the workforce from the mid-1940s through the late-1950s.
ii. Employees who entered the workforce during the 1960s through the
mid-1970s were influenced heavily by John F. Kennedy.
iii. Individuals who entered the workforce from the mid-1970s through
the mid-1980s reflect the society’s return to values that are more
traditional but with far greater emphasis on achievement and
material success.
iv. Generation X has been shaped by globalization, the fall of
communism, MTV, and the digital revolution.
d. The interviewer should identify an individual and conduct an interview
using the questionnaire created in class. Students might consider scouting
the local McDonald’s or Wal-Mart. These types of businesses hire across the
age spectrum, making it easier to find candidates to interview. Be careful to
request permission to perform interviews on business properties. Otherwise
you may be in violation of local laws.
e. Groups should meet and consolidate their information into a report, either a
ten-minute oral or a three to five page written report. As part of their
report, they should discuss the practical implications of any attitudinal
trends they discovered among the cohorts.
f. Groups should present and discuss their findings in class.
5. Analyzing Your Organization (Cumulative Project). For this part of the project,
students are asked to analyze employee attitudes and assess how well those
attitudes are perceived by supervisors. This is potentially a very sensitive task, and
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instructors should review the need for anonymity and sensitivity in situations such
as these.
Break the class back down into small groups (use the same groups as in the last
assignment or create new ones to increase the diversity of opinion) and have the
group brainstorm 5-10 statements regarding work attitudes based on the
descriptions in the text. For instance, they may create “I take a lot of meaning from
my work” as a measurement of job involvement.
As a class, select the best statements for each of the five job attitudes described in
the text. Create a questionnaire with these five questions answered using a
modified five-point Likert scale (Very True, Somewhat True, Neutral, Somewhat
Untrue, Very Untrue). Assign point values to each of the Likert Values (1-5 works
best).
Have the students ask five workers at random to answer the survey. Ensure their
privacy to get honest responses. Gather the surveys but do not show them to
anyone else at the organization.
Give a survey, marked “supervisor,” to the supervisors and ask them to mark where
they believe their average employee would be on the scales. Tell the supervisors
that the purpose of this survey is NOT to judge that individual supervisor’s ability to
assess the employees but to see if the average perceptions are different between
workers and supervisors.
Have the small group average the point values of the employee responses and of the
supervisor responses. Compare the two. Discuss the following issues:
1. How close were the supervisor’s perceptions to reality?
2. What issues may have concerned employees when they took the survey?
3. What issues may have concerned the supervisors regarding the survey?
Suggested Assignments:
1. Discuss the small group findings of the cumulative case (No. 5 above) in
2. After the small group work, have the student write up the findings and the
potential impact of those general findings in the firm the student is