Chapter 10: Employee Satisfaction and Commitment

Job Satisfaction –attitude an employee has toward her job

Organizational Commitment – extent to which employee identifies with and is involved with an organization

 Why should we care about employee attitudes?

o Affective-Cognitive Consistency – Employees who have a strong, consistent beliefs about their level of job
satisfaction
 What Causes Employees to be satisfied with and committed to their Jobs?
 Three Motivational Facets:
o Affective Commitment - employee wants to remain with the organization, cares about the organization and
exert effort on its behalf
o Continuance Commitment – employee believes she must remain with the organization due to the time,
expense, effort that she has already put into it and difficulty she would have in finding another job
o Normative Commitment – employee feels obligated to the organization, and must remain with the
organization
o What individual differences affect job satisfaction?
Antecedent – influence job satisfaction and commitment is our personal predisposition to be satisfied
Individual Difference Theory – some variability in job satisfaction is due to an individual personal
tendency across situations to enjoy what she does
3 Areas:
 Genetic Predisposition – genetically determined
- 30% of job satisfaction appears to be explainable by genetic factors
- does not mean there is a “job satisfaction gene”
- Inherited personality traits such as negative affectivity are related to our tendency to be
satisfied with the job
 Core self-evaluation – series of personality variables appear to be related to job satisfaction
4 personality variables:
1. Emotional Stability
2. Self esteem
3. Self-Efficacy – perceived ability to master their environment
4. External locus of control - perceived ability to control their environment
Culture
Intelligence
 Life satisfaction
o Are employees satisfied with other aspect of their lives?
Ex. Marriage, friends, family, job and geographic location
 Satisfaction with one’s job “spills over” into other aspect of life, and satisfaction with other aspects of life
spill over into satisfaction with one’s job
 People who are unhappy in life and unhappy on their jobs will not leave their jobs , because they are used to
being unhappy
 People who are normally happy in life, being unhappy at work is seen as a reason to find another job
o Are employee jobs expectations being met?
 Discrepancy Theory (Wanous, Poland, Premack and Davis) – employee expectations are not me, the
results are lover job satisfaction, decreased organizational commitment, and increased intent to leave
the organization
- “met expectation” theory
 Irving and Meyer – in contrast, employee’s experiences on the job were most related to job satisfaction
and that the difference between their expectations and experiences was only minimally related to job
satisfaction
 Zhao, Wayne, Glibkowski and Bravo – invested psychological contracts -the effect of employees
perceiving that an organization has not fulfilled its promises and obligations to an employee
 When such psychological contract breaches occur, job satisfaction and organizational commitment go
down and employee intentions to leave the organization increase
o Is the employee a good fit with the job and the organization?
Five aspects of fit:
1. Vocation – career such as nursing, law enforcement or 1sychology
2. Job – particular tasks
3. Organization
4. Coworkers
 5. Supervisor
6. Needs/Supplies fit (Cable and DeRue) – rewards, salary, and benefits received by employees are
perceived to be consistent with their efforts and performance
 Employees who perceive a good fit with their organization, job, coworkers, and supervisor tend to
be satisfied with their jobs, identify with the organization, remain with the organization, perform
better and engage in organizational citizenship behavior
 Employees desire for a particular work schedule (shift, number of hours) matches their actual
schedule and his actual schedule, the greater the employees satisfaction, organizational
commitment, performance, and likelihood to remain the organization
 Branham: Certain signs to which organization should pay attention that indicate a job/person
mismatch
 Does not seem excited when fist hired or assigned to jb
 Starts asking for some tasks to be given to other employees
 Applies for other jobs in the organization
 Begins to ask for new projects
 Appears bored or unchallenged
o Are the tasks enjoyable?
 Employees who find their work interesting are more satisfied and motivated than employees who do
not enjoy their jobs
 Employees rank interesting work as being the most important factor in a job, supervisors rank salary and
bonus as being the most important for employees
 Glanz – advised employers to take innovative steps to make work more interesting
o Do employees enjoy working with supervisors and coworkers?
 Satisfaction with supervisors and coworkers was related to organizational and team commitment, which
in turn resulted in higher productivity, lower intent to leave organization and a greater willingness to
help
o Are coworkers outwardly unhappy?
 Social Information Processing Theory (Social Learning Theory) – employees obserbve the levels of
motivation and satisfaction of other employees and them model those levels
 Older employees’ behavior will model by the new employees.
 Confederates – subjects performed a task with two experimenters pretending to be other subjects
o Are rewards and resources given equitably?
 Equity theory - our levels of job satisfaction and motivation are related to how fairly we believed we are
treated in comparison with others
1. Distributive Justice – perceive the fairness of the actual decisions made in an organization
2. Procedural Justice – perceived fairness of the methods used to arrive at the decision
3. Internal Justice – perceived fairness of the interpersonal treatment employees received
o Is there any chance for growth and challenge?
Maslow – need for growth and challenge (self- actualization) – important only after low level needs have
been met
 Job Rotation – employee given the same number of tasks to do at one time but the tasks change from
time to time
 Job Enlargement –employee is given more tasks to do at one time
2 ways:
1. Knowledge Enlargement – employees are allowed to make more complex decisions
2. Task Enlargement – employees are given more tasks of the same difficulty level perform
 Satisfaction increases with knowledge enlargement and decreased with task enlargement
 2 Main Objectives of Job Rotation and Enlargement: a) they challenge employees by requiring them
to operate several different machine or perform several different time b) job rotation helps to
alleviate boredom by allowing an employee to change tasks
 Job Enrichment – better way to satisfy self-actualization needs
- Employee assumes more responsibility over the tasks
1. Job characteristic model (Hackman and Oldham) – theorized enrich jobs are the most satisfying.
Enriched jobs allow a variety of skills that have meaning or importance, allow employees to make
decisions, and provide feedback about performance
2. Job Diagnostic Survey – to measure the extent to which these characteristics are present in a given
job
3. Self-directed teams/Quality circles – final method for increasing employees’ self-actualization needs.
Quality circles, employees meet as a group to discuss and make recommendations about work
issues
 o Integration of Theories
 Theories to design an organizational climate that is more conductive to motivation and satisfaction than
is the typical climate
 Individual-Differences Theories – each of us brings to a job an initial tendency to be satisfied with life and
its various aspects such as work
 Discrepancy Theories - will remain satisfied with our job if it meets our various needs, wants,
expectations and values
 Intrinsic satisfaction theory and job characteristics theory – will be more satisfied with our jobs if the
tasks themselves are enjoyable to perform
 Career workshop: What to do if you are unhappy with your job?
 Measuring satisfaction and commitment
1. Standard job satisfaction inventories
2. Custom-designed satisfaction inventories
o Commonly used standard inventories
Measuring of Job Satisfaction
1. Faces Scale (Kunin) - first methods for measuring job satisfaction. Easy to use, it is no longer commonly
administered because it lacks sufficient detail, lacks construct validity and because some employees
believe it is so simple that it is demeaning
2. Job Descriptive Index/ JDI (Smith, Kendall and Hulin) – most commonly used scale today. It consists of a
series of job-related adjectives and statements that are rated by employees. The scales yield scores on
five dimensions of job satisfaction: supervision, pay ,promotional opportunities, coworkers and the work
itself
3. Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire/MSQ (Weiss, Dawis, England, and Lofquist) – contains 100 items
that yield scored on 20 scales
4. Job in General (JIG) Scale (Ironson, Smith, Brannick, Gibson and Paul) – useful when organization wants
to measure the overall level of job satisfaction rather than specific aspects
Nagy – criticized many of the standard measures of job satisfaction.
Nagy Job Satisfaction Scale – 2 questions per facet: one asking how important the facet is to the
employee and the other asking how satisfied the employee is with the facet
Measuring of Commitment
 Most measures of organizational commitment are relative short and tap aspects similar to three
types of commitment: affective, continuance and normative commitment
 Allen and Meyer – most commonly used measure of organizational commitment. Survey has 24
items, 8 each for the three factors of affective, continuance, and normative.
 Other measures:
A. Organizational Commitment Questionnaire/OCQ (Mowday, Steers and Porter) – 15-item
questionnaire to measure three commitment factors: acceptance of the organization’s values
and goals, willingness to work to help the organization, and a desire to remain with the
organization
B. Organizational Commitment Scale/OCS ( Balfour and Wechsler) – 9-atem survey that measures 3
aspects of commitment: identification, exchange and affiliation.
Examples: “I felt like a part of the family at this organization “and “What this organization stands for is important
to me.”
 Employment profile
o Custom –designed Inventories
 Organization can ask employees questions specific to their organization.
 Consequences of dissatisfaction and other negative work attitudes
o Absenteeism
 Linking attendance to consequences
 Rewards for attending
1. Financial Incentives
2. Time Off
3. Recognition Programs
 Discipline for Not Attending
 Clear Policies and Better Record of Keeping
 Increasing attendance by reducing employee stress
 Increasing attendance by reducing illness
 Reducing absenteeism by not hiring “absence-prone” employees
 Uncontrollable Absenteeism caused by unique events
o Turnover
 Cost of Turnover
1. Visible Cost - include advertising charges, employment agency fees, referral bonuses,
recruitment travel cost, salaries and benefits associated with the employee spent processing
applications and interviewing candidates, and recollection of expensed for the new
employee
2. Hidden Cost – include the loss of productivity associated with the employee leaving – other
employees trying to do extra work, no productivity occurring from the vacant position and
the lower productivity associated with a new employee being trained
 Reducing Turnover
1. Unavoidable reasons
2. Advancement
3. Unmet needs
4. Escape
5. Unmet Ecpectations
o Counterproductive behaviors
 Dissatisfied employee, especially those who are unable to change jobs, engage in a variety of
counterproductive behaviors
1. Aimed at individuals - include gossip, playing negative politics, harassment, incivility,
workplace violence, and bullying
2. Aimed at the organization- include theft and sabotage
o Lack of Organizational Citizenship behaviors
 Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCBs) – are motivated to help the organization and their
coworkers by doing the “little things” that they are not required to do