Chapter 4: Job Attitudes

课 题 Chapter 4: Job Attitudes

通过本章学习，掌握能够个体的工作态度如何对组织行为产生影
教学目标
响，并明确其工作原理。
1.张德，《组织行为学》，清华大学出版社，2000 年。
2.[美]罗宾斯，《组织行为学》（第 14 版），中国人民大学出
版社，2012 年。
3.周文霞等，《组织行为学教学案例精选》，复旦大学出版
社，1998 年。
参考教材
4.俞文钊，《管理心理学》（上、下册），东方出版中心，2002
参考书目、文
年。
献
5.苏东水，《管理心理学》，复旦大学出版社，2002 年。
6. [美]安杰洛 基尼奇， 《组织行为学：关键概念、技能与最
佳实践》（第四版，注释版），中国人民大学出版社，2011.
7.张岩松，王艳洁. 《组织行为学——理论、案例、实训》，清
华大学出版社，2016 年。

教学重难点 工作态度，工作满意度，态度和行为的内在联系。

教学方法
讲授课、讨论课
教学手段
课程类别 √理论课 □实验课 □技能课
课 时 □1 课时 √2 课时 □3 课时 □4 课时
教学设计 详见后页

Chapter 4:
Job Attitudes

Chapter Overview

This chapter examines attitudes; their link to behavior; and how employees’ satisfaction
or dissatisfaction with their jobs affects the workplace.

Chapter Objectives

45
After studying this chapter, the student should be able to:
1. Contrast the three components of an attitude.
2. Summarize the relationship between attitudes and behavior.
3. Compare and contrast the major job attitudes.
4. Define job satisfaction and show how it can be measured.
5. Summarize the main causes of job satisfaction and identify four employee
responses to dissatisfaction.
6. Show whether job satisfaction is a relevant concept in countries other than the
United States.

I. INTRODUCTION

This chapter will focus on job-related attitudes. One particular

attitude, job satisfaction, will be examined at length.

II. ATTITUDES Slide

# 4-2
Attitudes: evaluative statements – either favorable or
unfavorable – concerning objects, people, or events. They
reflect how one feels about something.
Slide
Attitudes are complex and the rationale behind them may not be
# 4-3
obvious. There are three main issues we must examine regarding
attitudes: (1) what are the main components that make up attitudes;
(2) how they relate to behavior; and (3) what are the major
attitudes that relate to jobs.

A. Main Components of Attitudes. There are three main

components of attitudes:

1. Cognition. What a person thinks about an object, person, or

event. This component is often given in emotionless Slide
evaluative statements. These thoughts (or cognitions) are # 4-4
the basis for the next component of attitude.

“Ice cream is cold” is a cognitive statement.

Exhibit
Exhibit
2. Affective. This component is the critical emotional overlay ##4-1
4-1
to the cognitive thought. It expresses how we feel about
that object, person or event. The affective component
builds on, and amplifies, the cognitive component. In
reality, these two components are often inseparable.

“I love ice cream on a hot day” is an affective (“I love”)

statement.

46
 Chapter 4: Job Attitudes

3. Behavior. This is the actual or intended behavior brought

about by the first two components of attitude. It is what we
will do about that object, person, or event.

“It is hot, I am going to the store to get a half-a-gallon of

ice cream” expresses a behavior in keeping with the
person’s attitude toward ice cream.

While breaking attitudes into three sequenced components

makes understanding them much easier in the classroom, in the
real world separating or ordering these three components is
hard to do. Often the three components seem to occur
simultaneously within individuals.

B. Does Behavior Always Follow from Attitudes? While Slide

attitudes may seem to be directly causal, Leon Festinger argued # 4-5
that attitudes follow behavior. People, he claimed, change what
they say it does not contradict what they do.

1. Cognitive Dissonance. Leon Festinger called situations

where attitudes followed behavior cognitive dissonance.
Festinger’s theory is that dissonance between what they say
and what they do makes people uncomfortable and that
they will take whatever actions they can to reduce that
discomfort, such as changing their attitudes or behaviors.

Cognitive Dissonance: refers to any inconsistency that

an individual might perceive between two or more
attitudes, or between behavior and attitudes.

According to Festinger, the level of effort that is put forth

to reduce the dissonance depended on three moderating
factors:

a. Importance. The importance of the elements creating

the dissonance modifies the level of effort. The greater
the importance, the more effort will be expended to
reduce the dissonance.

b. Degree of influence. If a person feels he or she has

some measure of control over the elements, more effort
will be expended. However, if the elements are felt to
be outside of the person’s control, little effort will be
made to reduce dissonance.

c. Rewards. What reward is there to keep or remove the

dissonance? These rewards can affect the motivation
toward making changes. People who are rewarded well

47
 for living with high dissonance tend to feel less
pressure to remove the dissonance. (“I should be home
with my family, yet I need to work long hours in this
job. However, the salary is so high that I cannot leave.
At least I can now afford to send my kids to a private
school.”)

The moderating factors suggest that just because some

individuals experience dissonance, they are not necessarily
moved toward reducing it.

Recent research has shown that knowing a person’s attitude

allows for a reasonable prediction of future behavior.
Another concept of Festinger’s is that there exists
modifying factors separate and distinct from those of
dissonance that affect attitudes and can allow reasonably
accurate predictions of behavior.

2. Moderating Variables. The most powerful moderators of

the attitude-behavior relationship are: Slide
# 4-6
a. Importance. Important attitudes reflect fundamental
values, self-interest, or identification. The greater the
importance the stronger the link between attitude and
behavior becomes.

b. Correspondence to Behavior. The more closely the

attitude and the behavior are matched, the stronger the
link between them.

c. Accessibility. The easier an attitude is to recall, the

stronger the link. The more frequently an attitude is
expressed, the more accessible it is and therefore the
stronger its link becomes to behavior.

d. Social Pressures. Exceptional social pressures can

override personal attitudes and may have a stronger
relation to behavior than do the attitudes. This
subservience of personal attitude to social pressure is
often found in organizations.

e. Personal Direct Experience. Predictions of behavior

tend to be more accurate when the person whose
behavior is being predicted has some experience
regarding the situation.

C. Major Job Attitudes. There are three important attitudes

toward work that OB has traditionally studied: job satisfaction, Slide
# 4-7

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 Chapter 4: Job Attitudes

job involvement, and organizational commitment. There are

two other work-related attitudes that are attracting attention:
perceived organizational support and employee engagement.

1. Job Satisfaction. This attitude relates to how an employee

feels about the job. High job satisfaction means strong
positive feelings about it; low satisfaction means strong
negative feelings exist. Because of the critical nature of
this attitude to OB, we will explore it deeply in a moment.

Job Satisfaction. A positive feeling about one’s job

resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics.

2. Job Involvement. Closely related to job satisfaction and

psychological empowerment, this attitude describes how
much a person “buys into” their job based on the job’s
worth to that person and how much control the employee
has over the job itself. High levels of job
involvement/empowerment are related to higher job
performance, better organizational citizenship behaviors,
fewer absences, and lower turnover.

Job Involvement. The degree to which people identify

psychologically with their jobs and consider their
perceived performance level important to self-worth.

Psychological Empowerment. Employees’ beliefs in

the degree to which they affect their work environment,
their competence, the meaningfulness of their job, and
the perceived autonomy in their work.

3. Organizational Commitment. Similar to job involvement,

this attitude shows how strongly the employee identifies
with the firm for which he or she is working (job
involvement focuses on identification with the job, while
organizational commitment focuses on the defecation with
the firm).

Organizational Commitment. A state in which an

employee identifies with a particular organization and
its goals and wishes to maintain membership in the
organization.

There are three separate dimensions of this attitude:

a. Affective Commitment: the emotional attachment to an

organization and a belief in its values. An allegiance,

49
 this dimension appeals to the heart and is the strongest
dimension in terms of organizational outcomes.

b. Continuance Commitment: the perceived economic

value of remaining with an organization compared to
leaving it. As an economic problem, this dimension
appeals to the wallet and is a weak indicator of
organizational outcomes.

c. Normative Commitment: an obligation to remain with

the organization for moral or ethical reasons. As an
obligation, this dimension appeals to the mind and self-
image.

There is only a modest relationship between organizational

commitment and organizational outcomes such as job
productivity, absenteeism, and turnover. In these
relationships, the affective commitment seems to be the
dominant factor.

The importance of this attitude has diminished over the last

few decades due to dramatic changes in the work
environment. No longer do employees typically believe
that they will work for just one firm for all of their work
lives. This new premise makes organizational commitment
less relevant to OB studies. Perhaps a better attitude to
measure in future would be occupational commitment.

4. Perceived Organizational Support (POS). An addition to

the more traditional work attitudes, this measures how
much an employee trusts the organization.

Perceived Organizational Support. The degree to

which employees believe the organization values their
contribution and cares about their well-being.

Organizations are considered supportive when they:

a. Fairly provide rewards,

b. Give employees a voice in decision-making, and

c. Provide supervisors who are seen as being supportive.

Some findings suggest that employees with strong POS

perceptions are more likely to have high levels of
organizational citizenship behaviors and job performance.

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 Chapter 4: Job Attitudes

5. Employee Engagement. Another recent addition, this

attitude measures how deeply the employees feel they are
involved in their work.

Employee Engagement. An individual’s involvement

with, satisfaction with, and enthusiasm for, the work he
or she does.

Conditions that can increase engagement include:

a. Opportunities to learn new skills,

b. Important and meaningful work, and

c. Positive interactions with coworkers and supervisors.

This broad new attitude has been shown to relate positively

with customer satisfaction, productivity, profit, and lower
turnover and accident rates.

6. Are Job Attitudes Distinct? One of the weaknesses of

attitude research in OB is that the identified attitudes are
deeply related and correlated. It is possible that all of these
variables are just facets of the same basic attitude. This
redundancy is inefficient and confusing, but the study of
attitudes is a work in progress and situations such as this
are typical as social scientists strive to understand the
workplace.

III. JOB SATISFACTION

As mentioned earlier, this attitude is one of the oldest and most

critical attitudes examined in OB studies.

D. Measuring Job Satisfaction. An employees’ assessment of

Slide
how satisfied he or she is with the job is a complex summation
# 4-8
of a number of discrete job album. This makes measurement
somewhat difficult. There are two widely used approach is to
measuring this attitude:

1. Single Global Rating Method. This method uses responses

to a short series of general questions about the job to
determine job satisfaction. Surprisingly, this simple
method seems to be a more accurate measure of job
satisfaction than the more complex summation method.

2. Summation Score Method. This method identifies key

elements in the job and asks for the employee’s feelings

51
 about each element. Respondents answer on a standardized
scale and their responses are tallied to create an overall job
satisfaction score.

E. How Satisfied Are People In Their Jobs? In general,

employees in developed nations are satisfied with their jobs. It Exhibit
Exhibit
should be noted that the level of satisfaction for some ##4-2
4-2
components of this attitude (pay and promotion) show lower
levels of satisfaction than the overall measure might lead us to
believe exists.

F. What Causes Job Satisfaction? The most powerful Slide

component in the job satisfaction attitude is the nature of the # 4-9
work itself: whether you liked the work you did. Work that is
challenging and stimulating tends to be more satisfying.

Pay, once about a given level, does not increase satisfaction.

Exhibit
While money may be a motivator, it does not necessarily make Exhibit
##4-3
people happy – at least once they have enough to live 4-3
comfortably.

G. The Effects of Satisfied and Dissatisfied Employees on the

Workplace. There are consequences both when employees Slide
like their jobs when they dislike them. # 4-10

1. 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.

a. Exit. This response involves directing behavior toward Exhibit

Exhibit
leaving the organization. It includes both looking for a ##4-4
4-4
new job, as well as resigning.

b. Voice. This response involves actively and

constructively attempting to improve conditions.
Includes making suggestions and union activities.

c. Loyalty. This response involves passively, but

optimistically, waiting for conditions to improve. It
involves trusting the organization and its management
to “do the right thing.”

d. Neglect. This response involves passively allowing

conditions to worsen. Includes chronic absenteeism,
reduced effort, and increased error rate.

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 Chapter 4: Job Attitudes

This model includes both typical performance variables and

constructive behaviors that allow individuals to tolerate
unpleasant situations.

2. Job Satisfaction and Job Performance. Increased job Slide

satisfaction is related to better job and organizational # 4-11
performance, although it is difficult to tell which way the
causality runs.

3. Job Satisfaction and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors

(OCB). Satisfaction modestly influences OCB primarily
through perceptions of fairness. When fairness is removed
from the equation, no relationship exists.

Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCB).

Discretionary behaviors that contribute to
organizational effectiveness but are not part of an
employee’s formal job description.

4. Job Satisfaction and Customer Satisfaction. Satisfied

employees increase customer retention and loyalty because
satisfied employees tend to be upbeat and helpful.
Additionally a lower turnover rate (due to job satisfaction)
also increases customer satisfaction because the personnel
tend to be more experienced and familiar to the customer.

As part of “the work itself” component of job satisfaction,

when employees have to face rude and demanding
customers on a daily basis, their job satisfaction decreases.

5. Job Satisfaction and Absenteeism. There is a weak-to-

moderate negative relationship between job satisfaction and
absenteeism, meaning that as employees increase in job
satisfaction they are marginally less likely to skip work.
This relationship is moderated by other variables, such as
the number of sick days employees can take.

6. Job Satisfaction and Turnover. There is a relatively strong

negative relationship between job satisfaction and turnover.
While other extraneous factors (labor-market conditions
and tenure on the job) may influence the strength of this
relationship, it still seems that the higher the satisfaction
level, the less likely an employee is to leave an
organization for other work.

This relationship is not true for all workers. High

performing employees show a weaker relationship between
job satisfaction and turnover, perhaps due to the incentives

53
 given by organizations to keep them from leaving. Low
performing employees however show a stronger
relationship, which may arise from efforts by the
organization to get the ineffective workers to seek
employment elsewhere.

7. Job Satisfaction and Workplace Deviance. Workplace

deviance, or employee withdrawal, can take many forms,
including, unionization attempts, substance abuse, theft,
lollygagging, and tardiness. The incidence of workplace
deviance tends to increase as job satisfaction decreases.
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. Managers should attack the
source of the problem – dissatisfaction – rather than to try
to control the different responses to that dissatisfaction.

8. Managers Often “Don’t Get It.” While there is much

evidence that job satisfaction can affect organizational
outcomes, many managers still are unconcerned about the
job satisfaction of their employees or they falsely believe
employee satisfaction is high. Job satisfaction must be a
managerial priority and managers must measure it to
manage it.

III. GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS

Slide
A. Is Job Satisfaction a U.S. Concept? This concept appears to # 4-12
be global: people in other cultures can and do form judgments
of job satisfaction. Similar factors appear to cause, and result
from, job satisfaction across cultures.

B. Are Employees in Western Cultures More Satisfied with

Their Jobs? While the concept appears relevant across Exhibit
Exhibit
cultures, there are still cultural differences in job satisfaction. ##4-5
4-5
Western cultures tend to have higher levels of job satisfaction
than Eastern cultures. This may be because people in Eastern
cultures tend to value negative emotions more than do
Westerners.

IV. IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGERS Slide

# 4-13
A. Managers should be interested in employees’ attitudes because
attitudes give warnings of potential problems and because they
influence behavior.

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 Chapter 4: Job Attitudes

 Satisfied and committed employees exhibit behaviors

that increase organizational outcomes.

 Managers must measure job attitudes in order to

improve them.

 Most important elements a manager can focus on are

the intrinsic parts of the job: making the work
challenging and interesting.
Slide
 High pay is not enough to create satisfaction. # 4-14
B. Keep in Mind…

 Individuals have many kinds of attitudes about their

job.

 Job satisfaction is related to organizational

effectiveness.

 Most employees are satisfied with their jobs, but when Slide
they are not, a host of actions in response to the # 4-15
satisfaction might be expected.

55
Discussion Questions
1. Describe the three components of an attitude. Give an example for each.

Answer: Cognition: what a person thinks about an object, person, or event.

Affective: the emotional overlay to the cognitive thought. It expresses how we
feel about that object, person or event. Behavior: the actual or intended behavior
brought about by the first two components of attitude. It is what we will do about
that object, person, or event.

Examples will vary. Ensure the key ideas of thinks, feels, and does are clearly
stated.

2. What is the relationship between attitudes and behavior?

Answer: Leon Festinger believed that attitudes followed behavior due to cognitive
dissonance. The negative feelings aroused when actions were not aligned with
words caused the expressed attitudes to change. More commonly, recent
research has shown that behavior follows attitudes. Therefore, it is important for
managers to understand employee attitudes so they may better predict 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 “buys into” their job based on the job’s worth to that person and how
much control the employee has over the job itself. Organizational commitment is
similar to job involvement, but it shows how strongly the employee identifies with
the organization rather than with just the job. These three are the traditional
attitudes studied by OB.

Two additional attitudes are perceived organizational support (which measures

how much an employee trusts the organization) and employee engagement, which
measures how deeply involved the employees feel they are in their work. All of
these attitudes may in fact be measuring the same basic underlying attitude
toward work. To varying degrees, each of these attitudes positively affects job
performance and organizational outcomes.

4. How can managers increase job satisfaction and what are the organizational
consequences when there are high or low levels of job satisfaction?

Answer: Job satisfaction can best be increased through the design of the work
itself. Work that is challenging and interesting will lead to increased job
satisfaction. Other factors that increase job satisfaction are good supervisors and
co-workers, the ability to promote and to a lesser extent, pay. Pay only increases
satisfaction to the point where a comfortable lifestyle is reached, after that point
pay ceases to increase job satisfaction when pay is increased.

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 Chapter 4: Job Attitudes

High job satisfaction is linked to better organizational outcomes: lower turnover

and absenteeism, higher customer satisfaction, and fewer instances of workplace
deviance. Low levels of job satisfaction result in opposite effects.

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.

Exit: involves directing behavior toward leaving the organization, includes both
looking for a new job, as well as resigning. Voice: involves actively and
constructively attempting to improve conditions, includes making suggestions and
union activities. Loyalty: involves passively, but optimistically, waiting for
conditions to improve. It involves trusting the organization and its management
to "do the right thing." Neglect: involves passively allowing conditions to worsen,
including chronic absenteeism, reduced effort, and increased error rate.

6. Is job satisfaction a global concept?

Answer: It appears to be. While the concept itself is global, there are still
cultural issues involved in its expression. Western cultures tend to have higher
levels of job satisfaction, perhaps due to the emphasis in the West toward positive
emotions and individual happiness.

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 toward that object, person, or event at that point in time. Then as a group,
discuss how your attitudes changed toward various objects, persons, or events as
the result of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center of 9/11. Prepare a list
of the most commonly changed attitudes held by the group. Discuss how these
attitudes were expressed in behaviors. Share your findings with the class.

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.

57
 b. As a class discuss the questions and ideas and narrow 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.

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 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

58
 Chapter 4: Job Attitudes

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 in class. Build up student understanding

of the importance of perception in OB and management based on the
survey results.

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
examining (it is strongly suggested that the student NOT directly compare
the employees of the firm with the supervisor of the firm to prevent
potential problems).

59