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1. Job Attitudes: Job Satisfaction &
Organizational Commitment

2. Nature of Job Satisfaction
• An attitudinal variable that reflects how people feel about their
jobs overall and about different aspects of them.
• Two approaches to the study of job satisfaction:
a. Global approach treats job satisfaction as a single overall feeling
toward the job.
b. Facet approach lists different aspects of a job, the job facets, and
assesses satisfaction with each of them. Facets include pay,
benefits, supervision, co-workers, the nature of the work, job
conditions, etc.

3. Nature of Job Satisfaction
Four important cultural values in the workplace:
• 1. Individualism/Collectivism: whether the focus is on the interests
and needs of the individual (individualism) or of other people
(collectivism).
• 2. Masculinity: organizations focus on achievement and job
performance as opposed to the health and well being of the
employees.
• 3. Power Distance: the tolerance that people have for power and
status differences among levels of an organization.
• 4. Uncertainty avoidance: the level of comfort in uncertain
situations.

4. Antecedents of Job Satisfaction
What makes people like or dislike their jobs?
Environmental Antecedents
• Features of the job environment may cause job satisfaction--features of the job,
its tasks, or the organization.
Job Characteristics
• Skill variety: the number of different skills necessary to do a job.
• Task identity: whether an employee does an entire job or a piece of a job.
• Task significance: the impact a job has on other people.
• Autonomy: the degree of freedom employees have to do their jobs as they see
fit.
• Job feedback: the extent to which it’s obvious to employees when they’re doing
their jobs correctly.
• Pay has been shown to relate more to pay satisfaction than to global work
satisfaction.
• Justice - both procedural (fairness of the process) and distributive (fairness of the
outcome) justice have been linked to global and facet satisfaction.

5. Personal Antecedents
1. Personality
i. Negative affectivity (NA), or the tendency for an individual to experience
negative emotions across a variety of situations.
2. Gender differences: Men and women show few differences in global job
satisfaction.
3. Age differences: Older workers to be more satisfied with their jobs than younger
workers.
4. Cultural and ethnic differences. Workplaces are becoming more diverse now, and
some organizations have locations in several countries.

6. Potential Effects of Job Satisfaction
• Job performance: Global job satisfaction is related to job performance.
• Turnover: Dissatisfied employees are more likely to quit.
• Absence: Correlations between absence and job satisfaction tend to be small.
• Health and well-being: Dissatisfied employees report more physical symptoms
and more negative emotions it work.
• Life satisfaction: How satisfied a person is with his or her life. Correlates with job
satisfaction.

7. Organizational Commitment
• Organizational commitment is the attachment of the individual to the
organization. Two conceptions:
1. Mowday et al. (1979) suggests three components:
• a. Acceptance of the organization’s goals.
• b. Willingness to work hard for the organization.
• c. Desire to stay with the organization.
2. Meyer et al. (1993) suggests three types of commitment:
• a. Affective: when the employee wants to remain with the organization because
of emotional attachment.
• b. Continuance: when a person remains with the organization because he or she
needs benefits or salary, or can’t get another job.
• c. Normative: when a person thinks s/he owes it to the organization to stay or
that it’s the right thing to do. Arises from a sense of obligation or personal
values.

8. Organizational Commitment
Organizational commitment and other variables
1. Turnover. Low commitment overall and on each of the three types predicts
leaving the job.
2. Job satisfaction. Organizational commitment is strongly correlated with global job
satisfaction.
3. Performance -- The exception is job performance, which has only a small
correlation with commitment. Note that continuance commitment correlates
negatively with job performance whereas affective and normative commitments
are associated with better job performance.