Download VALUES, ATTITUDES, AND JOB SATISFACTION

Chapter 3
Attitudes and Job Satisfaction
79
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CHAPTER
3
Attitudes and
Job Satisfaction (ppt 3-1)
Click on title when connected to the Internet to access teaching notes
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter, students should be able to (ppt 3-2):
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Contrast the three components of an attitude.
Summarize the relationship between attitudes and behavior.
Compare and contrast the major job attitudes.
Define job satisfaction and show how it can be measured.
Summarize the main causes of job satisfaction.
Identify four employee responses to dissatisfaction.
INSTRUCTOR RESOURCES
Text Exercises
An Ethical Choice: Do Employers Owe Workers More Satisfying Jobs? (p. 108,
IM p. 92)
GlOBalizattion: Culture and Work-Life Balance (p. 110, IM p. 93)
Myth or Science?: “Favorable Job Attitudes Make Organizations More
Profitable” (p. 117, IM p. 95)
Point/Counterpoint: Employer-Employee Loyalty Is an Outdated Concept (p.
121, IM p. 96)
Questions for Review (p. 122, IM p. 98)
Experiential Exercise: What Factors Are Most Important to Your Job
Satisfaction? (p. 123, IM p. 101)
Ethical Dilemma: Bounty Hunters (p. 123, IM p. 104)
Text Cases
Case Incident 1: Long Hours, Hundreds of E-Mails, and No Sleep: Does This
Sound Like a Satisfying Job? (p. 124, IM p. 105)
Case Incident 2: Crafting a Better Job (p. 125, IM p. 108)
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Instructor’s Choice - Discovering Your Own VALS (IM p. 109)
This section presents an exercise that is NOT found in the student's textbook. Instructor's
Choice reinforces the text's emphasis through various activities. Some Instructor's Choice
activities are centered around debates, group exercises, Internet research, and student
experiences. Some can be used in-class in their entirety, while others require some
additional work on the student's part. The course instructor may choose to use these at
anytime throughout the class—some may be more effective as icebreakers, while some
may be used to pull together various concepts covered in the chapter.
WEB EXERCISES (IM p. 111)
At the end of each chapter of this instructor’s manual, you will find
suggested exercises and ideas for researching the WWW on OB topics. The
exercises “Exploring OB Topics on the Web” are set up so that you can
simply photocopy the pages, distribute them to your class, and make
assignments accordingly. You may want to assign the exercises as an out-ofclass activity or as lab activities with your class.
SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGERS
Managers should be interested in their employees’ attitudes because attitudes give
warnings of potential problems and influence behavior. Creating a satisfied workforce is
hardly a guarantee of successful organizational performance, but evidence strongly
suggests that whatever managers can do to improve employee attitudes will likely result
in heightened organizational effectiveness.
Some take-away lessons from the study of attitudes include the following:
 Satisfied and committed employees have lower rates of turnover,
absenteeism, and withdrawal behaviors. They also perform better on the
job. Given that managers want to keep resignations and absences down—
especially among their most productive employees—they’ll want to do
things that generate positive job attitudes.
 Managers will also want to measure job attitudes effectively so they can
tell how employees are reacting to their work. As one review put it, “A
sound measurement of overall job attitude is one of the most useful
pieces of information an organization can have about its employees.”
 The most important thing managers can do to raise employee satisfaction
is focus on the intrinsic parts of the job, such as making the work
challenging and interesting.
 Although paying employees poorly will likely not attract high-quality
employees to the organization or keep high performers, managers should
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realize that high pay alone is unlikely to create a satisfying work
environment.
The chapter opens by profiling Tannourine Hospital in Lebanon. The CEO, Dr. Walid Harb uses a
micromanagement style where every department has delegated responsibilities and authority. He also
encouraged open communication and employee feedback. The result is a highly satisfied productive
workforce with considerable loyalty to Dr. Harb.
BRIEF CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Attitudes (ppt 3-3)
A. Introduction
1. Attitudes are evaluative statements that are either favorable or unfavorable
concerning objects, people, or events.
2. Attitudes are not the same as values, but the two are interrelated.
B. What Are the Main Components of Attitudes?
1. Three components of an attitude (Exhibit 3-1)
a. Cognitive component
b. Affective component
c. Behavioral component
C. Does Behavior Always Follow from Attitudes? (ppt 3-4)
1. Introduction
a. The attitudes people hold determine what they do.
b. Festinger proposed that cases of attitude following behavior illustrate the
effects of cognitive dissonance, any incompatibility an individual might
perceive between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes.
c. Research has generally concluded that people seek consistency among
their attitudes and between their attitudes and their behavior.
2. Moderating Variables (ppt 3-5)
a. Importance of the attitude
b. Its correspondence to behavior
c. Its accessibility
d. The presence of social pressure
e. Whether or not a person has had direct experience with the behavior
f. The attitude–behavior relationship is likely to be much stronger if an
attitude refers to something with which we have direct personal experience
(ppt 3-5)
D. What Are the Major Job Attitudes? (ppt 3-6)
1. Introduction
a. OB focuses our attention on a very limited number of job-related attitudes.
Most of the research in OB has been concerned with three attitudes: job
satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment.
2. Job Satisfaction
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3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
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a. Definition: refers to a collection of feelings that an individual holds
toward his or her job.
b. A high level of job satisfaction equals positive attitudes toward the job and
vice versa.
Job Involvement
a. A workable definition: the measure of the degree to which a person
identifies psychologically with his/her job and considers his/her perceived
performance level important to self-worth.
Logical empowerment
a. Employees’ beliefs in the degree to which they influence
i. their work environment,
ii. their competence, the meaningfulness of their job, and
iii. their perceived autonomy.
Organizational Commitment (ppt 3-7)
a. Definition: A state in which an employee identifies with a particular
organization and its goals.
b. A positive relationship appears to exist between organizational
commitment and job productivity, but it is a modest one.
c. Theoretical models propose that employees who are committed will be
less likely to engage in work withdrawal even if they are dissatisfied,
because they have a sense of organizational loyalty.
Perceived organizational support (POS)
a. Degree to which employees believe the organization values their
contribution and cares about their well being.
b. Research shows that people perceive their organization as supportive when
rewards are deemed fair, when employees have a voice in decisions, and
when they see their supervisors as supportive.
c. Employees with strong POS perceptions have been found more likely to
have higher levels of organizational citizenship behaviors, lower levels of
tardiness, and better customer service.
Employee engagement—individual’s involvement with, satisfaction with, and
enthusiasm for, the work she does
Are These Job Attitudes Really All That Distinct? (ppt 3-9)
a. Attitudes are highly related. Example: If you know someone’s affective
commitment, you basically know their perceived organizational support.
b. The redundancy is inefficient and confusing.
II. Job Satisfaction
A. Measuring Job Satisfaction
1. The definition of job satisfaction—a positive feeling about a job resulting
from an evaluation of its characteristics—is broad.
2. Two approaches for measuring Job Satisfaction are popular:
a. The single global rating
b. The summation of job facets
B. How Satisfied Are People in Their Jobs?
1. Most people are satisfied with their jobs in the developed countries surveyed.
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C.
D.
E.
F.
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2. Research shows that over the past 30 years, the majority of U.S. workers have
been satisfied with their jobs.
3. As shown Exhibit 3-2 people have typically been more satisfied with their
jobs overall, with the work itself, and with their supervisors and co-workers
than they have been with their pay and with promotion opportunities.
4. Workers do seem to be less satisfied with their pay and promotion.
opportunities.
What Causes Job Satisfaction? (Exhibit 3-3)
1. Interesting jobs that provide training, variety, independence, and control
satisfy most employees.
2. There is also a strong correspondence between how well people enjoy the
social context of their workplace and how satisfied they are overall.
3. Money and Job Satisfaction
a. For people who are poor or who live in poor countries, pay does correlate
with job satisfaction and overall happiness.
b. But once an individual reaches a level of comfortable living (in the United
States, that occurs at about $40,000 a year, depending on the region and
family size), the relationship between pay and job satisfaction virtually
disappears.
c. Exhibit 3-4 shows the relationship between the average pay for a job and
the average level of job satisfaction.
4. Personality also plays a role in Job Satisfaction.
a. Research has shown that people who have positive core self-evaluations
are more satisfied with their jobs than those with negative core selfevaluations.
b. Those with negative core self-evaluations set less ambitious goals and are
more likely to give up when confronting difficulties.
The Impact of Dissatisfied and Satisfied Employees on the Workplace
1. Introduction
a. There are a number of ways employees can express dissatisfaction:
(Exhibit 3-5)
b. Exit: Behavior directed toward leaving the organization, including looking
for a new position as well as resigning.
c. Voice: Actively and constructively attempting to improve conditions,
including suggesting improvements, discussing problems with superiors,
and some forms of union activity.
d. Loyalty: Passively but optimistically waiting for conditions to improve,
including speaking up for the organization in the face of external criticism,
and trusting the organization and its management to “do the right thing.”
e. Neglect: Passively allowing conditions to worsen, including chronic
absenteeism or lateness, reduced effort, and increased error rate.
Satisfaction and job performance:
1. Happy workers are not necessarily productive workers—the evidence suggests
that productivity is likely to lead to satisfaction.
Job Satisfaction and OCB
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1. It seems logical to assume job satisfaction should be a major determinant of
an employee’s organizational citizenship behavior (OCB).
2. Fairness perceptions help explain the relationship.
3. Finally, research shows that when people are in a good mood, they are more
likely to engage in OCBs.
Job Satisfaction and Customer Satisfaction
1. Evidence indicates that satisfied employees increase customer satisfaction and
loyalty.
Job Satisfaction and Absenteeism
1. We find a consistent negative relationship between satisfaction and
absenteeism. The more satisfied you are, the less likely you are to miss work.
Job Satisfaction and Turnover
1. Satisfaction is also negatively related to turnover, but the correlation is
stronger than what we found for absenteeism.
Job Satisfaction and Workplace Deviance
1. Job dissatisfaction predicts unionization, stealing, undue socializing, and
tardiness.
2. If employees don’t like their work environment, they will respond somehow.
Managers Often “Don’t Get It”
1. Given the evidence we’ve just reviewed, it should come as no surprise that job
satisfaction can affect the bottom line.
2. Regular surveys can reduce gaps between what managers think employees
feel and what they really feel.
III. Summary and Implications for Managers
A. Managers should be interested in their employees’ attitudes because attitudes give
warnings of potential problems and influence behavior.
B. Creating a satisfied workforce is hardly a guarantee of successful organizational
performance, but evidence strongly suggests that whatever managers can do to
improve employee attitudes will likely result in heightened organizational
effectiveness.
C. Some take-away lessons from the study of attitudes include the following:
1. Satisfied and committed employees have lower rates of turnover, absenteeism,
and withdrawal behaviors. They also perform better on the job. Given that
managers want to keep resignations and absences down—especially among
their most productive employees—they’ll want to do things that generate
positive job attitudes.
2. Managers will also want to measure job attitudes effectively so they can tell
how employees are reacting to their work. As one review put it, “A sound
measurement of overall job attitude is one of the most useful pieces of
information an organization can have about its employees.”
3. The most important thing managers can do to raise employee satisfaction is
focus on the intrinsic parts of the job, such as making the work challenging
and interesting.
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4. Although paying employees poorly will likely not attract high-quality
employees to the organization or keep high performers, managers should
realize that high pay alone is unlikely to create a satisfying work environment.
EXPANDED CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Attitudes
A. Introduction
1. Attitudes are evaluative statements that are either favorable or unfavorable
concerning objects, people, or events.
2. Attitudes are not the same as values, but the two are interrelated.
B. What Are the Main Components of Attitudes?
1. Three components of an attitude (Exhibit 3-1)
a. Cognitive component
i. The employee thought he deserved the promotion (cognitive)
b. Affective component
i. The employee strongly dislikes his supervisor (affective)
c. Behavioral component
i. The employee is looking for another job (behavioral)
ii. In organizations, attitudes are important because of the behavioral
component
C. Does Behavior Always Follow from Attitudes?
1. Introduction
a. The attitudes people hold determine what they do.
b. Festinger proposed that cases of attitude following behavior illustrate the
effects of cognitive dissonance, any incompatibility an individual might
perceive between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes.
c. Research has generally concluded that people seek consistency among
their attitudes and between their attitudes and their behavior.
d. Individuals seek to reconcile divergent attitudes and align their attitudes
and behavior so they appear rational and consistent.
e. Festinger proposed that the desire to reduce dissonance depends on
moderating factors, including the importance of the elements creating it
and the degree of influence we believe we have over them. Individuals
will be more motivated to reduce dissonance when the attitudes or
behavior are important or when they believe the dissonance is due to
something they can control.
f. A third factor is the rewards of dissonance; high rewards accompanying
high dissonance tend to reduce the tension inherent in the dissonance.
D. Moderating Variables
1. Importance of the attitude
a. Its correspondence to behavior
b. Its accessibility
c. The presence of social pressure
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d. Whether or not a person has had direct experience with the behavior
e. The attitude–behavior relationship is likely to be much stronger if an
attitude refers to something with which we have direct personal experience
E. What Are the Major Job Attitudes?
1. Introduction
a. OB focuses our attention on a very limited number of job-related attitudes.
Most of the research in OB has been concerned with three attitudes: job
satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment.
2. Job Satisfaction
a. Definition: refers to a collection of feelings that an individual holds
toward his or her job.
b. A high level of job satisfaction equals positive attitudes toward the job and
vice versa.
c. Employee attitudes and job satisfaction are frequently used
interchangeably.
d. Often when people speak of “employee attitudes” they mean “employee
job satisfaction.”
3. Job Involvement
a. A workable definition: the measure of the degree to which a person
identifies psychologically with his/her job and considers his/her perceived
performance level important to self-worth.
b. High levels of job involvement are thought to result in fewer absences and
lower resignation rates.
c. Job involvement more consistently predicts turnover than absenteeism.
d. Psychological empowerment—employees’ beliefs in the degree to which
they impact their work.
4. Logical empowerment
a. Employees’ beliefs in the degree to which they influence
i. their work environment,
ii. their competence, the meaningfulness of their job, and
iii. their perceived autonomy
b. One study of nursing managers in Singapore found that good leaders
empower their employees by involving them in decisions, making them
feel their work is important, and giving them discretion to “do their own
thing.”
5. Organizational Commitment
a. Definition: A state in which an employee identifies with a particular
organization and its goals.
b. A positive relationship appears to exist between organizational
commitment and job productivity, but it is a modest one.
c. As with job involvement, the research evidence demonstrates negative
relationships between organizational commitment and both absenteeism
and turnover.
d. Theoretical models propose that employees who are committed will be
less likely to engage in work withdrawal even if they are dissatisfied,
because they have a sense of organizational loyalty.
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i. On the other hand, employees who are not committed, who feel less
loyal to the organization, will tend to show lower levels of attendance
at work across the board.
ii. Research confirms this theoretical proposition.
iii. It does appear that even if employees are not currently happy with
their work, they are willing to make sacrifices for the organization if
they are committed enough.
6. Perceived organizational support (POS)
a. The degree to which employees believe the organization values their
contribution and cares about their well being.
b. Research shows that people perceive their organization as supportive
i. when rewards are deemed fair,
ii. when employees have a voice in decisions, and
iii. when they see their supervisors as supportive.
c. Employees with strong POS perceptions have been found more likely to
have
i. higher levels of organizational citizenship behaviors,
ii. lower levels of tardiness, and
iii. better customer service.
d. Though little cross-cultural research has been done, one study found POS
predicted only the job performance and citizenship behaviors of
untraditional or low power-distance Chinese employees—in short, those
more likely to think of work as an exchange rather than a moral obligation.
7. Employee engagement—individual’s involvement with, satisfaction with, and
enthusiasm for, the work she does
a. Highly engaged employees have a passion for their work and feel a deep
connection to their company
b. Disengaged employees have essentially checked out—putting time but not
energy or attention into their work
c. Engagement becomes a real concern for most organizations because
surveys indicate that few employees—between 17 percent and 29
percent—are highly engaged by their work
d. Engagement is a very general concept, perhaps broad enough to capture
the intersection of the other variables we’ve discussed. In other words, it
may be what these attitudes have in common.
8. Are These Job Attitudes Really All That Distinct?
a. Attitudes are highly related. Example: If you know someone’s affective
commitment, you basically know his or her perceived organizational
support.
b. The redundancy is inefficient and confusing.
II. Job Satisfaction
A. Measuring Job Satisfaction
1. Our definition of job satisfaction—a positive feeling about a job resulting
from an evaluation of its characteristics—is clearly broad.
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2. Jobs require interacting with co-workers and bosses, following organizational
rules and policies, meeting performance standards, living with less than ideal
working conditions, and the like.
3. Two approaches for measuring Job Satisfaction are popular:
4. The single global rating is a response to one question, such as “All things
considered, how satisfied are you with your job?” Respondents circle a
number between 1 and 5 on a scale from “highly satisfied” to “highly
dissatisfied.”
5. The second method, the summation of job facets, is more sophisticated. It
identifies key elements in a job such as the nature of the work, supervision,
present pay, promotion opportunities, and relations with coworkers.
B. How Satisfied Are People in Their Jobs?
1. Most people are satisfied with their jobs in the developed countries surveyed.
2. Research shows that over the past 30 years, the majority of U.S. workers have
been satisfied with their jobs.
3. As shown in Exhibit 3-2, people have typically been more satisfied with their
jobs overall, with the work itself, and with their supervisors and co-workers
than they have been with their pay and with promotion opportunities.
4. Workers do seem to be less satisfied with their pay and promotion
opportunities.
C. What Causes Job Satisfaction? (Exhibit 3-3)
1. Interesting jobs that provide training, variety, independence, and control
satisfy most employees.
2. There is also a strong correspondence between how well people enjoy the
social context of their workplace and how satisfied they are overall.
a. Interdependence, feedback, social support, and interaction with coworkers outside the workplace are strongly related to job satisfaction even
after accounting for characteristics of the work itself.
3. Money and Job Satisfaction
a. For people who are poor or who live in poor countries, pay does correlate
with job satisfaction and overall happiness.
b. But once an individual reaches a level of comfortable living (in the United
States, that occurs at about $40,000 a year, depending on the region and
family size), the relationship between pay and job satisfaction virtually
disappears.
c. Exhibit 3-4 shows the relationship between the average pay for a job and
the average level of job satisfaction.
d. Money does motivate people, as we will discover in Chapter 6.
i. But what motivates us is not necessarily the same as what makes us
happy.
ii. Maybe your goal isn’t to be happy. But if it is, money’s probably not
going to do much to get you there.
4. Personality also plays a role in Job Satisfaction.
a. Research has shown that people who have positive core self-evaluations
who believe in their inner worth and basic competence—are more satisfied
with their jobs than those with negative core self-evaluations.
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b. Not only do they see their work as more fulfilling and challenging, they
are more likely to gravitate toward challenging jobs in the first place.
c. Those with negative core self-evaluations set less ambitious goals and are
more likely to give up when confronting difficulties.
D. The Impact of Dissatisfied and Satisfied Employees on the Workplace
1. Introduction
a. There are a number of ways employees can express dissatisfaction:
(Exhibit 3-5)
b. Exit: Behavior directed toward leaving the organization, including looking
for a new position as well as resigning.
c. Voice: Actively and constructively attempting to improve conditions,
including suggesting improvements, discussing problems with superiors,
and some forms of union activity.
d. Loyalty: Passively but optimistically waiting for conditions to improve,
including speaking up for the organization in the face of external criticism,
and trusting the organization and its management to “do the right thing.”
e. Neglect: Passively allowing conditions to worsen, including chronic
absenteeism or lateness, reduced effort, and increased error rate.
f. Exit and neglect behaviors encompass our performance variables—
productivity, absenteeism, and turnover.
g. Voice and loyalty are constructive behaviors allow individuals to tolerate
unpleasant situations or to revive satisfactory working conditions. It helps
us to understand situations, such as those sometimes found among
unionized workers, where low job satisfaction is coupled with low
turnover.
E. Satisfaction and job performance:
1. Happy workers are not necessarily productive workers—the evidence suggests
that productivity is likely to lead to satisfaction.
2. At the organization level, there is renewed support for the original
satisfaction-performance relationship. It seems organizations with more
satisfied workers as a whole are more productive organizations.
F. Job Satisfaction and OCB
1. It seems logical to assume job satisfaction should be a major determinant of
an employee’s organizational citizenship behavior (OCB).
a. Satisfied employees would seem more likely to talk positively about the
organization, help others, and go beyond the normal expectations in their
job, perhaps because they want to reciprocate their positive experiences.
b. Evidence suggests job satisfaction is moderately correlated with OCBs;
people who are more satisfied with their jobs are more likely to engage in
OCBs.
2. Fairness perceptions help explain the relationship.
a. Those who believe their co-workers support them are more likely to
engage in helpful behaviors, whereas those who have antagonistic
relationships with co-workers are less likely to do so.
b. Individuals with certain personality traits are also more satisfied with their
work, which in turns leads them to engage in more OCBs.
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3. Finally, research shows that when people are in a good mood, they are more
likely to engage in OCBs
Job Satisfaction and Customer Satisfaction
1. Evidence indicates that satisfied employees increase customer satisfaction and
loyalty.
2. Some firms encourage employees to “create fun and a little weirdness” and
they give them unusual discretion in making customers satisfied.
3. One report suggests that low employee morale was a major factor
undermining passenger satisfaction.
Job Satisfaction and Absenteeism
1. We find a consistent negative relationship between satisfaction and
absenteeism. The more satisfied you are, the less likely you are to miss work.
2. It makes sense that dissatisfied employees are more likely to miss work, but
other factors have an impact on the relationship and reduce the correlation
coefficient. For example, you might be a satisfied worker, yet still take a
“mental health day” to head for the beach now and again.
Job Satisfaction and Turnover
1. Satisfaction is also negatively related to turnover, but the correlation is
stronger than what we found for absenteeism.
2. The satisfaction–turnover relationship also is affected by alternative job
prospects.
a. If an employee is presented with an unsolicited job offer, job
dissatisfaction is less predictive of turnover because the employee is more
likely leaving in response to “pull” (the lure of the other job) than “push”
(the unattractiveness of the current job).
b. Job dissatisfaction is more likely to translate into turnover when
employment opportunities are plentiful because employees perceive it is
easy to move.
3. When employees have high “human capital” (high education, high ability),
job dissatisfaction is more likely to translate into turnover because they have,
or perceive they have, many available alternatives.
Job Satisfaction and Workplace Deviance
1. Job dissatisfaction predicts unionization, stealing, undue socializing, and
tardiness.
a. Researchers argue these behaviors are indicators of a broader syndrome
called deviant behavior in the workplace (or counterproductive behavior
or employee withdrawal)
2. If employees don’t like their work environment, they will respond somehow.
a. It’s hard to predict exactly how they will respond
b. To effectively control the undesirable consequences of job dissatisfaction,
employers should attack the source of the problem—the dissatisfaction—
rather than try to control the different responses.
Managers Often “Don’t Get It”
1. Given the evidence we’ve just reviewed, it should come as no surprise that job
satisfaction can affect the bottom line.
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2. Stock prices of companies in the high morale group grew 19.4 percent,
compared with 10 percent for the medium or low morale group.
3. Regular surveys can reduce gaps between what managers think employees
feel and what they really feel.
III. Summary and Implications for Managers
A. Managers should be interested in their employees’ attitudes because attitudes give
warnings of potential problems and influence behavior.
B. Creating a satisfied workforce is hardly a guarantee of successful organizational
performance, but evidence strongly suggests that whatever managers can do to
improve employee attitudes will likely result in heightened organizational
effectiveness.
C. Some take-away lessons from the study of attitudes include the following:
1. Satisfied and committed employees have lower rates of turnover, absenteeism,
and withdrawal behaviors. They also perform better on the job. Given that
managers want to keep resignations and absences down—especially among
their most productive employees—they’ll want to do things that generate
positive job attitudes.
2. Managers will also want to measure job attitudes effectively so they can tell
how employees are reacting to their work. As one review put it, “A sound
measurement of overall job attitude is one of the most useful pieces of
information an organization can have about its employees.”
3. The most important thing managers can do to raise employee satisfaction is
focus on the intrinsic parts of the job, such as making the work challenging
and interesting.
4. Although paying employees poorly will likely not attract high-quality
employees to the organization or keep high performers, managers should
realize that high pay alone is unlikely to create a satisfying work environment.
An Ethical Choice
Do Employers Owe Workers More Satisfying Jobs?
This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the relationship between attitudes and
behavior; Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship between personality traits and individual behavior,
Describe the components of human resource practices; and AACSB Learning Goal: Ethical understanding
and reasoning abilities
Research by the Conference Board suggests that job satisfaction for U.S. employees is at
a 23-year low. This appears to be occurring in the midst of a dramatic growth in
information technology that was supposed to make work easier for employees. What is
going on here? Are employers failing to consider an ethical responsibility to employees
by providing a satisfying, fulfilling experience at work?
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When Professor James Heskett of Harvard posted information about these low job
satisfaction rates on his blog, respondents provided a variety of different explanations for
why U.S. workers are less satisfied than they were in the past. They included economic
pressures, instability in the business environment, and increased competition to get the
best jobs. Others believe businesses have become so focused on stock prices and
profitability that the personal relationship that used to exist between employers and
employees has been lost. Still others proposed that in a poor economic environment,
employees who wanted to switch to a new job aren’t always able to find alternatives,
leaving them “hostages” to a dissatisfying work situation.
Whatever the explanation, there is cause for concern. Survey data from Towers
Watson’s global workforce study of 20,000 employees in 22 markets around the world
found that employees are especially concerned about job security and feel they are
entirely responsible for ensuring their long-term career prospects work out. In the current
economic environment, it seems that in employers’ minds, employee well-being and
security have taken a back seat to coping with workplace realities.
What can managers do to ensure they are making ethical decisions about protecting the
quality of the workplace in their organizations? As we have shown, managers can enact a
variety of concrete steps—including improving working conditions and providing a
positive social environment—that will make work more enjoyable for employees.
Employers may also want to think about whether their efforts to achieve efficiency and
productivity are creating a work environment that is not very satisfying for employees.
Source: Based on J. Heskett, “Why Are Fewer and Fewer U.S. Employees Satisfied with Their Jobs?”
Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, April 2, 2010, hbswk.hbs.edu; Towers Watson, 2010 Global
Workforce Study, New York: Author
Class Exercise
Form groups of three to five students.
Have each group discuss whether or not anyone has observed similar situations
develop in a work situation or in school.
Evaluate how students indicate such situations manifested themselves and how they
were treated in the social setting.
Did these situations result in better or poorer work performance? Did they make the
environment a difficult place to be or improve it?
Teaching Notes
This exercise is applicable to face-2-face classes or synchronous online classes such as
BlackBoard 9.1, WIMBA, and Second Life Virtual Classrooms. See
http://www.baclass.panam.edu/imob/SecondLife for more information.
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GlOBalization
Culture and Work-Life Balance
This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the relationship between attitudes and
behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes; Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship
between personality traits and individual behavior, Dynamics of the global economy; and AACSB
Learning Goal: Dynamics of the global economy
The increased time pressures of the always-connected workplace are eroding the
boundary between work life and personal life, and many individuals in postindustrial
economies struggle to balance the two. Is this striving for work-life balance unique to the
North American and European context, or is it a global phenomenon?
One possible reason for variations in work-life balance across countries is
differences in the structure and functioning of the family. Some research suggests that
countries with stronger differences in expectations for men and women have different
levels and types of work-life conflict. Other research suggests that work-life balance will
be different in an individualistic country like the United States than in a country that is
more collectivist in its orientation. In individualist countries, employers might expect
more sacrifice from their employees in terms of their family lives, whereas collectivist
nations where family has a higher priority will have fewer work-life balance issues.
Conversely, collectivists’ higher value on family may mean they feel more conflicted if
there are competing demands from the workplace and home.
There are other reasons to suspect that research based on the U.S. context will not
generalize to other countries. Data from a study by Harvard and McGill University
researchers found that work-life balance policies like paid maternity leave, paternity
leave, and paid time off in the United States are far less generous than in other wealthy
nations. The study’s lead author, Jody Heymann, notes, “More countries are providing the
workplace protections that millions of Americans can only dream of.” The research
interest in work-life balance may at least partially be a reflection of an unusually strong
conflict between work and family life in the United States.
At the same time, many of the same issues that contribute to work-life imbalance
are present in other countries. Globally, the rise of the dual-earner couple has meant that
both partners now have family responsibilities that must be met. Always-connected
technology that blurs the line between personal and work time have become standard for
managers in every part of the world. The institution of “siesta,” or a midday break, used
to be much more common in Hispanic cultures than it is today as the globalized
workplace puts greater demands on workers. Concerns about overwork have also become
very prevalent in the rapidly growing economic sphere of East Asia. The Japanese even
have a term, “karoshi,” referring to death from overwork.
Research to date does suggest that work-life concerns are present in other
cultures. For example, most studies find that feelings of conflict between work and
personal life are related to lower levels of satisfaction and higher levels of psychological
strain. The magnitude of these relationships varies across countries, but it appears that
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concerns about work interfering with family are present around the world. There is also
evidence that translated U.S. surveys about work-life conflicts are equally good measures
of work-life conflicts in Europe and East Asia.
Even with the growth of international research, most studies to date have been
designed and conducted entirely within the United States, and many others have been
conducted in cultures with marked similarities to the United States, like Canada and
Great Britain. As the number of international studies continues to increase, we will
develop a better understanding of how different cultures relate to work-life challenges.
Source: Based on G. N. Powell, A. M. Francesco, and Y. Ling, “Toward Culture-Sensitive Theories of the
Work-Family Interface,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 30, (2009), pp. 597-616; Anonymous,
“Survey: U.S. Workplace Not Family-Oriented.” MSNBC.com, May 22, 2007,
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16907584/; and J. Lu, O. Siu, P. E. Spector, and K. Shi, “Antecedents and
Outcomes of a Fourfold Taxonomy of Work-Family Balance in Chinese Employed Parents,” Journal of
Occupational Health Psychology 14, (2009), pp. 182-192.
Class Exercise
1. Divide students into groups of three to five each.
2. Ask each group to prepare a short white paper to define how positive work-life
policies and programs contribute to job satisfaction.
3. Would the group try to install work-life approaches from international cultures into
U.S. companies?
4. Have the groups present their positions to the class.
Teaching Notes
This exercise is applicable to face-2-face classes or synchronous online classes such as
BlackBoard 9.1, WIMBA, and Second Life Virtual Classrooms. See
http://www.baclass.panam.edu/imob/SecondLife for more information.
Myth or Science?
Favorable Job Attitudes Make Organizations More
Profitable
This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the relationship between attitudes and
behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes; Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship
between personality traits and individual behavior; and AACSB Learning Goal: Reflective thinking skills.
This statement appears to be true.
A recent study of 2,178 business units suggested that job attitudes measured at
one point in time predicted organizational financial performance roughly six months later.
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In the study, job attitudes were measured through employees’ responses to 12 questions
(such as, “At work, my opinions seem to count”) and financial performance was
measured in terms of revenue and profit margin.
Why does employee job satisfaction appear to pay off? The authors of this study
uncovered two explanations: Satisfied employees are less likely to quit, and they
engender stronger customer loyalty. Low turnover and high customer loyalty both
helped make organizations more profitable.
This study also found some evidence for what might be called a virtuous cycle:
Having satisfied employees tends to improve subsequent financial performance, which
tends to improve later employee satisfaction even further.
No organization can be all things to all employees, but this study does suggest
that attention to improving employee attitudes is well rewarded. The authors of this study
conclude, “Improving employee work perceptions can improve business competitiveness
while positively impacting the well-being of employees.”
Source: J. K. Harter, F. L. Schmidt, J. W. Asplund, E. A. Killham, and S.Agrawal, “Causal Impact of
Employee Work Perceptions on the Bottom Line of Organizations,” Perspectives on Psychological Science
5, No. 4 (2010), pp. 378-389.
Class Exercise
1. Brainstorm with students about situations where they knew workers/employees
were unhappy with the company or their jobs, but still did a reasonably good job.
Perhaps have them share insights into their own feelings about their school, or a
particular class they disliked but still tried very hard.
2. Discuss why someone who is unhappy with his/her job might work hard at it and
do good work.
3. Why would someone who is happy with his/her job not perform at a higher level
than the disgruntled worker?
4. Students should come to realize that most effort comes from internal drive, not
external motivation. As a result, a highly internally motivated individual might
perform well in any circumstance whereas his/her organizational environment
would not positively affect a non-internally motivated individual.
Teaching Notes
This exercise is applicable to face-2-face classes or synchronous online classes such as
BlackBoard 9.1, WIMBA, and Second Life Virtual Classrooms. See
http://www.baclass.panam.edu/imob/SecondLife for more information.
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Point/CounterPoint
Employer-Employee Loyalty Is an Outdated Concept
This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the relationship between attitudes and
behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes; Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship
between personality traits and individual behavior; and AACSB Learning Goal: Reflective thinking skills.
Point
The word loyalty is so outdated it is practically laughable. Long gone are the days
when an employer would keep an employee for life, as are the days when an employee
would work for a single company for his or her entire career.
Workplace guru Linda Gratton says, “Loyalty is dead – killed off through shortening
contracts, outsourcing, automation and multiple careers. Faced with what could be 50
years of work, who honestly wants to spend that much time with one company? Serial
monogamy is the order of the day.”
Right or wrong, the commitment on each side of the equation is weak. Take the
example of Renault. It ended the 31-year career of employee Michel Balthazard (and two
others) on charges of espionage. The problem? The charges were proved false. When the
falseness of the charges became public, Renault halfheartedly offered the employees their
jobs back and a lame apology: “Renault thanks them for the quality of their work at the
group and wishes them every success in the future.”
As for employee’s loyalty to their employers, that too is worth little nowadays. One
manager with Deloitte says the current employee attitude is, “I’m leaving, I had a great
experience, and I’m taking that with me.”
Employers tend to cut commitments to an employee, and reduce his or her benefits, the
minute they perceive they can do so. Employees tend to jump at the best available job
offer as soon as they see it.
The sooner we see the employment experience for what it is (mostly transactional,
mostly short- to medium-term), the better off we’ll be. The workplace is no place for
fantasies.
Counterpoint
There are employers and employees who show little regard for each other. That each
side can be uncaring or cavalier is hardly a revelation. No doubt such cynical attitudes are
as old as the employment relationship itself.
But is that the norm? And is it desirable? The answer to both these questions is no.
Says management guru Tom Peters, “Bottom line: loyalty matters. A lot. Yesterday.
Today. Tomorrow.” University of Michigan’s Dave Ulrich says, “Leaders who encourage
loyalty want employees who are not only committed to and engaged in their work but
who also find meaning from it.”
It is true that the employer – employee relationship has changed. For example,
(largely) gone are the days when employers provide guaranteed payout pensions to which
employees contribute nothing. But is that such a bad thing? There is a big difference
between asking employees to contribute to their pension plans and abandoning plans
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altogether (or firing without cause).
Moreover, it’s not that loyalty is dead, but rather that employers are loyal to a different
kind of employee. Gone are the days when an employer would refuse to fire a longtenured but incompetent employee. But is that the kind of loyalty most employees expect
today anyway? Companies are loyal to employees who do their jobs well, and that too is
as it should be.
In short, employees still expect certain standards of decency and loyalty from their
employers, and employers want engaged, committed employees in return. That is a good
thing—and not so different from yesterday. Says workplace psychologist Binna Kandola,
“Workplaces may have changed but loyalty is not dead – the bonds between people are
too strong.”
Source: P. Korkki, “The Shifting Definition of Worker Loyalty,” New York Times (April 24, 2011), p.
BU8; Is Workplace Loyalty an Outmoded Concept?” Financial Times (March 8, 2011), http://www.ft.com/;
O. Gough and S. Arkani, “The Impact of the Shifting Pensions Landscape on the Psychological Contract,”
Personnel Review 40, No. 2 (2011), pp. 173-184.
Class Exercise
Do this exercise before having the students read Point/Counterpoint.
1. Have students think about two to three jobs they have had, outside of family
chores. [Working for a family business is okay.]
2. Ask them to list the jobs at the top of the sheet of paper.
3. Next have them list what they really liked about the jobs and what they disliked
about the jobs.
4. Ask five-to-ten volunteers to write their job titles on the board and list 3–5 things
they really like/disliked about each job.
5. With the class, look for commonalties across jobs and consolidate them into a list
of things people like and do not like about work.
6. Have students then discuss what managers or supervisors could do to increase the
likes and decrease the dislikes.
7. Ask if these changes would cause them or others to work harder. Have them
explain why it would or would not.
8. Lead the students to draw conclusions about how much their supervisors or
managers control things that would increase their like or dislike, motivation or
demotivation for the job.
Teaching Notes
This exercise is applicable to face-2-face classes or synchronous online classes such as
BlackBoard 9.1, WIMBA, and Second Life Virtual Classrooms. See
http://www.baclass.panam.edu/imob/SecondLife for more information.
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Questions for Review
1. What are the main components of attitudes? Are these components related or
unrelated?
Answer: Cognitive component – the opinion or belief of an attitude. Affective
component – the emotional or felling segment of an attitude. Behavioral
component – an intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or
something. They are closely related, particularly cognition and affect. As a
manager, you need to understand how attitudes are formed and the relationship to
actual job behavior. (This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the
relationship between attitudes and behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes;
Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship between personality traits and individual behavior;
and AACSB Learning Goal: Reflective thinking skills.)
2. Does behavior always follow from attitudes? Why or why not? Discuss the factors that
affect whether behavior follows from attitudes.
Answer: No, sometimes the reverse is true according to Leon Festinger.
Cognitive Dissonance: is any incompatibility between two or more attitudes or
between behavior and attitudes. Individuals seek to reduce this uncomfortable
gap, or dissonance, to reach stability and consistency. Consistency is achieved by
changing the attitudes, modifying the behaviors, or through rationalization. The
desire to reduce dissonance depends on:
a. Importance of elements
b. Degree of individual influence
c. Rewards involved in dissonance
(This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the relationship between attitudes and
behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes; Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship
between personality traits and individual behavior; and AACSB Learning Goal: Reflective thinking
skills.)
3. What are the major job attitudes? In what ways are these attitudes alike? What is
unique about each?
Answer: Job Satisfaction - A positive feeling about the job resulting from an
evaluation of its characteristics.
Job Involvement - Degree of psychological identification with the job where
perceived performance is important to self-worth. Psychological Empowerment is
another closely related concept that is the belief in the degree of influence over
the job, competence, job meaningfulness, and autonomy.
Organizational Commitment - Identifying with a particular organization and its
goals, while wishing to maintain membership in the organization.
Organizational commitment has three dimensions:
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1. Affective – emotional attachment to organization
2. Continuance Commitment – economic value of staying
3. Normative – moral or ethical obligations
Organizational commitment has some relation to performance, especially for new
employees. It is less important now than in past – now perhaps there is more of an
occupational commitment, or a loyalty to a profession rather than a given
employer. There is a positive relationship between organizational commitment
and job productivity, however, modest. Evidence suggests that these attitudes are
highly-related. Some employees though, seem to be predisposed to be positive or
negative about many things. Additional job attitudes include improved
organizational support and employee engagement that are work-related attitudes
that also need to be understood by managers. Overall, there is some distinction,
but a lot of overlap. (This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the
relationship between attitudes and behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes;
Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship between personality traits and individual behavior;
and AACSB Learning Goal: Reflective thinking skills.)
4. How do we measure job satisfaction?
Answer: Job satisfaction is a positive feeling about a job resulting from an
evaluation of its characteristics. There are two widely used approaches to measure
job satisfaction. Single global rating (one question/one answer) that is considered
the best and summation score (many questions/one average) that is considered
okay. (This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the relationship between
attitudes and behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes; Learning Outcome:
Explain the relationship between personality traits and individual behavior; and AACSB
Learning Goal: Reflective thinking skills.)
5. What causes job satisfaction? For most people, is pay or the work itself more
important?
Answer: Pay and personality are the two main factors that seem to influence job
satisfaction. Pay influences job satisfaction only to a point. After about $40,000 a
year (in the U. S.), there is no relationship between amount of pay and job
satisfaction. Money may bring happiness, but not necessarily job satisfaction.
Personality can influence job satisfaction. Negative people are usually not
satisfied with their jobs. Overall, those with positive core self-evaluation are more
satisfied with their jobs. (This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the
relationship between attitudes and behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes;
Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship between personality traits and individual behavior;
and AACSB Learning Goal: Reflective thinking skills.)
6. What outcomes does job satisfaction influence? What implications does this have for
management?
Answer: Job satisfaction influences the following OB issues
Satisfaction and Job Performance
Job Satisfaction and Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB)
Job Satisfaction and Customer Satisfaction
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Job Satisfaction and Absenteeism
Job Satisfaction and Turnover
Job Satisfaction and Workplace Deviance
Implications for management include:
Satisfied and committed employees have lower rates of turnover,
absenteeism, and withdrawal behaviors. They also perform better on
the job. Given that managers want to keep resignations and absences
down—especially among their most productive employees—they’ll
want to do things that generate positive job attitudes.
Managers will also want to measure job attitudes effectively so they
can tell how employees are reacting to their work. As one review put
it, “A sound measurement of overall job attitude is one of the most
useful pieces of information an organization can have about its
employees.”
The most important thing managers can do to raise employee
satisfaction is focus on the intrinsic parts of the job, such as making
the work challenging and interesting.
Although paying employees poorly will likely not attract high-quality
employees to the organization or keep high performers, managers
should realize that high pay alone is unlikely to create a satisfying
work environment.
There are a number of ways managers can detect dissatisfaction. They include:
(Exhibit 3-5)
Exit: Behavior directed toward leaving the organization, including looking
for a new position as well as resigning.
Voice: Actively and constructively attempting to improve conditions,
including suggesting improvements, discussing problems with superiors,
and some forms of union activity.
Loyalty: Passively but optimistically waiting for conditions to improve,
including speaking up for the organization in the face of external criticism,
and trusting the organization and its management to “do the right thing.”
Neglect: Passively allowing conditions to worsen, including chronic
absenteeism or lateness, reduced effort, and increased error rate.
Exit and neglect behaviors encompass our performance variables—
productivity, absenteeism, and turnover.
Voice and loyalty are constructive behaviors allow individuals to tolerate
unpleasant situations or to revive satisfactory working conditions. It helps
us to understand situations, such as those sometimes found among
unionized workers, where low job satisfaction is coupled with low
turnover.
(This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the relationship between attitudes
and behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes, Identify four employee responses toe
dissatisfaction; Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship between personality traits and
individual behavior; and AACSB Learning Goal: Reflective thinking skills.)
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Experiential Exercise
What Factors Are Most Important to Your Job
Satisfaction?
This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the relationship between attitudes and
behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes; Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship
between personality traits and individual behavior; and AACSB Learning Goal: Reflective thinking skills.
Most of us probably want a job we think will satisfy us. But because no job is perfect, we
often have to trade off job attributes. One job may pay well but provide limited
opportunities for advancement or skill development. Another may offer work we enjoy
but have poor benefits. The following is a list of 21 job factors or attributes.
Autonomy and independence
Benefits
Career advancement opportunities
Career development opportunities
Compensation/pay
Communication between employees and
management
Contribution of work to organization’s business
goals
Feeling safe in the work environment
Flexibility to balance life and work issues
Job security
Job-specific training
Management recognition of employee job
performance
Meaningfulness of job
Networking
Opportunities to use skills/abilities
Organization’s commitment to professional
development
Overall corporate culture
Relationship with coworkers
Relationship with immediate supervisor
The work itself
The variety of work
On a sheet of paper, rank-order these job factors from top to bottom, so that number 1 is
the job factor you think is most important to your job satisfaction, number 2 is the second
most important factor to your job satisfaction, and so on.
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Now gather in teams of three or four people and try the following:
1. Appoint a spokesperson who will take notes and report the answers to the
following questions, on behalf of your group, back to the class.
2. Averaging across all members in your group, generate a list of the top five job
factors.
3. Did most people in your group seem to value the same job factors? Why or why
not?
4. Your instructor will provide you with the results of a study of a random sample of
600 employees conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management
(SHRM). How do your group’s rankings compare to the SHRM results?
When employees were asked how important the following factors were to their job
satisfaction, the figure below represents the percentage who listed the factor as “very
important” (as opposed to “important”, “neither important nor unimportant”,
“unimportant”, or “very unimportant”).
The chapter says that pay doesn’t correlate all that well with job satisfaction, but in the
SHRM survey, people say it is relatively important. Can your group suggest a reason for
the apparent discrepancy?
Now examine your own list again. Does your list agree with the group list? Does your list
agree with the SHRM study?
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Source: Esen, SHRM Job Satisfaction Series: 2005 Job Satisfaction (Alexandria, VA: Society for Human
Resource Management, 2005).
Teaching Notes
This exercise is applicable to face-2-face classes or synchronous online classes such as
BlackBoard 9.1, WIMBA, and Second Life Virtual Classrooms. See
http://www.baclass.panam.edu/imob/SecondLife for more information.
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Ethical Dilemma
Bounty Hunters
This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the relationship between attitudes and
behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes, Identify four employee responses toe
dissatisfaction; Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship between personality traits and individual
behavior; and AACSB Learning Goal: Ethical understanding and reasoning abilities,
Reflective thinking skills.
His SUV carefully obscured behind a row of trees, Rick Raymond, private
investigator, was on another case. This case was not to catch the unfaithful spouse or
petty criminal in action. Instead Raymond was tracking an employee at the request of an
employer, to determine whether an Orlando repairman was sick as he claimed today and
had several times recently.
As we have seen, absenteeism is a huge problem for organizations that has left
them desperate for solutions. One solution is to investigate. In the typical routine, when
an employee calls in sick, the employer asks for the reason. If the reason is illness, and it
has been illness an abnormal number of times in the past, the employer hires a P.I. to
follow the employee and photograph or videotape his or her activity outside the house.
Private investigators also are used to ascertain whether individuals filing injury claims
(and drawing worker’s compensation benefits) are in fact injured.
It may surprise you to learn that a recent court decision indicated hiring a private
investigator to follow an employee is legal. In this particular case, Diana Vail was fired
by Raybestos Products, an automotive parts manufacturer in Crawfordsville, Ind., after an
off-duty police officer hired by Raybestos produced evidence that she was abusing her
sick leave benefits. The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that such investigations were legal.
Despite their legality, such investigations are controversial. Oracle and HewlettPackard have reportedly used private investigators to follow managers or uncover the
source of leaks. Both actions spawned negative media coverage.
There is no doubt, though, that some employees do abuse their sick leave benefits.
In an earlier case, Raymond investigated an employee who called in sick with the flu for
three days. Raymond discovered that she actually visited Orlando theme parks on each of
those days. When Raymond showed her three time-stamped pictures of herself on rides,
the employee’s first response was, “That’s not me!” In another case, Raymond caught a
worker constructing an elaborate scheme to call in sick and go on a cruise. “When he was
shown the video surveillance I’d done, he actually said to his boss, ‘I can’t believe you’d
be so sneaky’.” Raymond said. “The hypocrisy is amazing.”
Questions
1. If you had reason to believe someone was lying about an absence from work, do you
think it would appropriate to investigate?
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2. If excessive absenteeism is a real problem in an organization, are there alternatives to
surveillance? If so, what are they, and do they have any limitations of their own?
Source: E. Spitznagel, “The Sick-Day Bounty Hunters,” Business Week (December 6-12, 2010), pp. 93-95;
D. Levine, “Oracle Enlists Private Eyes to Find HP CEO,” Reuters (November 9, 2010),
http://in.reuters.com/; K. Gullo, “HP’s Apotheker, Like Carmen Sandiego, Focus at Trial,” Businessweek
(November 10, 2010), http://www.businessweek.com/.
Case Incident 1
Long Hours, Hundreds of E-Mails, and No Sleep: Does
This Sound Like a Satisfying Job?
This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the relationship between attitudes and
behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes; Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship
between personality traits and individual behavior; and AACSB Learning Goal: Reflective thinking skills.
Although the 40-hour workweek is now the exception rather than the norm, some
individuals are taking things to the extreme.
John Bishop, 31, is an investment banker who works for Citigroup’s global
energy team in New York. A recent workday for Bishop consisted of heading to
the office for a conference call at 6:00 p.m. He left the office at 1:30 a.m. and had
to be on a plane that same morning for a 9:00 a.m. presentation in Houston.
Following the presentation, Bishop returned to New York the same day, and by
7:00 p.m., he was back in his office to work an additional three hours. Says
Bishop, “I might be a little skewed to the workaholic, but realistically, expecting
90 to 100 hours a week is not at all unusual.”
Irene Tse, 34, heads the government bond-trading division at Goldman Sachs. For
ten years, she has seen the stock market go from all-time highs to recession levels.
Such fluctuations can mean millions of dollars in either profits or losses. “There
are days when you can make a lot, and other days where you lose so much you’re
just stunned by what you’ve done,” says Tse. She also states that she hasn’t slept
completely through the night in years and frequently wakes up several times
during the night to check the global market status. Her average workweek? Eighty
hours. “I’ve done this for 10 years, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the
number of days in my career when I didn’t want to come to work. Every day I
wake up and I can’t wait to get here.”
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Tony Kurz, 33, is a managing director at Capital Alliance Partners and raises
funds for real-estate investments. However, these are not your average properties.
He often travels to exotic locations like Costa Rica and Hawaii, wooing
prospective clients. He travels more than 300,000 miles a year, often sleeping on
planes and dealing with jet lag. Kurz is not the only one he knows with such a
hectic work schedule. His girlfriend, Avery Baker, logs around 400,000 miles a
year, working as the senior vice president of marketing for Tommy Hilfiger. “It’s
not easy to maintain a relationship like this,” says Kurz. But do Kurz and Baker
like their jobs? You bet.
David Clark, 35, is the vice president of global marketing for MTV. His job often
consists of traveling around the globe to promote the channel, as well as to keep
up with the global music scene. If he is not traveling (Clark typically logs 200,000
miles a year), a typical day consists of waking at 6:30 a.m. and immediately
responding to numerous messages that have accumulated over the course of the
night. He then goes to his office, where throughout the day he will respond to
another 500 messages or so from clients around the world. If he’s lucky, he gets to
spend an hour a day with his son, but then it’s back to work until he finally goes
to bed around midnight. Says Clark, “there are plenty of people who would love
to have this job. They’re knocking on the door all the time. So that’s motivating.”
Many individuals would balk at the prospect of a 60-hour or more workweek with
constant traveling and little time for anything else. However, some individuals are
exhilarated by such professions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2004,
about 17 percent of managers worked more than 60 hours per week. But the demands of
such jobs are clearly not for everyone. Many quit, with turnover levels at 55 percent for
consultants and 30 percent for investment bankers, according to Vault.com. However, it is
clear that such jobs, which are time consuming and often stressful, can be satisfying to
some individuals.
Questions
1. Do you think that only certain individuals are attracted to these types of jobs, or is it
the characteristics of the jobs themselves that are satisfying?
Answer: This is an excellent discussion starter for students. You may wish to focus
on personality characteristics, life/work balance issues, and/or environmental
concerns. Factors such as age, gender, etc, may also play a role.
2. What characteristics of these jobs that might contribute to increased levels of job
satisfaction?
Answer: Have students “apply” the various approaches to defining job satisfaction.
For example, is the job as a whole satisfying? Are there certain elements in these jobs
that are preferred?
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3. Given that the four individuals we just read about tend to be satisfied with their jobs,
how might this satisfaction relate to their job performance, citizenship behavior, and
turnover?
Answer: We would expect that citizenship behavior would be positively affected and
these individuals would likely remain in their jobs. As for job performance, there is
no direct correlation between satisfaction and performance. However, it can be
inferred from commitment and staying with the job over a longer period of time.
4. Recall David Clark’s statement, “there are plenty of people who would love to have
this job. They’re knocking on the door all the time.” How might Clark’s perceptions
of having a job that many others desire contribute to his job satisfaction?
Answer: This could have a positive impact on job satisfaction. If others perceive the
job as positive, the occupant may also view it this way.
Source: Based on L. Tischler; “Extreme Jobs (And the People Who Love Them),” Fast Company, April 2005, pp. 55–60.
http://www.glo-jobs.com/article.php?article_no=87.
Teaching Notes
This exercise is applicable to face-2-face classes or synchronous online classes such as
BlackBoard 9.1, WIMBA, and Second Life Virtual Classrooms. See
http://www.baclass.panam.edu/imob/SecondLife for more information.
Case Incident 2
Crafting a Better Job
This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the relationship between attitudes and
behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes; Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship
between personality traits and individual behavior; and AACSB Learning Goal: Reflective thinking skills.
Consider for a moment a midlevel manager at a multinational foods company, Fatima,
who would seem to be at the top of her career. She’s consistently making her required
benchmarks and goals, she has built successful relationships with colleagues, and senior
management have identified her as “high potential.” But she isn’t happy with her work.
She’d be much more interested in understanding how her organization can use social
media in marketing efforts. Ideally, she’d like to quit and find something that better suits
her passions, but in the current economic environment this may not be an option. So she
has decided to proactively reconfigure her current job.
Fatima is part of a movement towards job “crafting,” which is the process of deliberately
reorganizing your job so that it better fits your motives, strengths, and passions. The core
of job crafting is creating diagrams of day-to-day activities with a coach. Then you and
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the coach collaboratively identify which tasks fit with your personal passions, and which
tend to drain motivation and satisfaction. Next the client and coach work together to
imagine ways to emphasize preferred activities and de-emphasize those that are less
interesting. Many people engaged in job crafting find that upon deeper consideration,
they have more control over their work than they thought.
So how did Fatima craft her job? She first noticed that she was spending too much of her
time monitoring her team’s performance and answering team questions, and not enough
time working on the creative projects that inspire her. She then considered how to modify
her relationship with the team so that these activities incorporated her passion for social
media strategies, with team activities more centered around developing new marketing.
She also identified members of her team who might be able to help her implement these
new strategies and directed her interactions with these individuals towards her new goals.
As a result, not only has her engagement in her work increased, but she has also
developed new ideas that are being recognized and advanced within the organization. In
sum, she has found that by actively and creatively examining her work, she has been able
to craft her current job into one that is truly satisfying.
Questions
1. Why do you think many people are in jobs that are not satisfying? Do organizations
help people craft satisfying and motivating jobs, and if not, why not?
Answer: The student’s answer for this question will be an opinion. The Why or Why
Not view might suggest that firms do try to create satisfying jobs by incorporating a
number of elements including job enrichment, job rotation, job education, and job
training (different from education) as methods to make job satisfaction higher. Other
students will indicate that firms do not try to make jobs more satisfying. They will
likely say that firms want productivity regardless of how satisfied the employees are.
2. Think about how you might reorient yourself to your own job. Are the principles of
job crafting described above relevant to your work? Why or why not?
Answer: Again, this is an opinion answer. Students will compare their work
experiences to the example of Fatima.
3. Some contend that job crafting sounds good in principle but is not necessarily
available to everyone. What types of jobs are probably not amenable to job crafting
activities?
Answer: Again, this is an opinion answer. But students will likely suggestion highly
routine jobs such as assembly line worker, customer services representative and the
like.
4. Are there any potential drawbacks to the job crafting approach? How can these
concerns be minimized?
Answer: One of the concerns most likely to be mentioned by students is the erosion
of focus on the job to be done. The concern would be that modifying job methods
might lead to more inefficient ways of completing the task, and therefore, a loss of
productivity.
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Source: Based on A. Wrzesniewski, J. M. Berg, and J. E. Dutton, “Turn the Job You Have into the Job You
Want,” Harvard Business Review, (June 2010), pp. 114-117; A. Wrzesniewski and J. E. Dutton, “Crafting a
Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work,” Academy of Management Review 26,
(2010), pp. 179-201; and J. Caplan, “Hate Your Job? Here’s How to Reshape It,” Time (Dec. 4, 2009),
www.time.com
Instructor’s Choice
Discovering Your Own VALS
This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the relationship between attitudes and
behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes; Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship
between personality traits and individual behavior; and AACSB Learning Goal: Reflective thinking skills.
It is always difficult to assess one’s values because of the various factors that can
influence values. One company that has come up with an interesting but simple approach
to values designation and assessment is SRI Consulting Business Intelligence. SRI
developed a topology called VALS (Values and Lifestyles). This trademarked process
assesses a person’s values and lifestyles with respect to their primary motivation and
resources. A person’s primary motivation would determine what in the person’s
meaningful core would govern his or her actions and activities. Resources go beyond
mere wealth or possessions. Resources include personality traits (such as energy, selfconfidence, and so forth) and how these traits match to demographics and resources.
Through the VALS studies, SRI has devised eight segments that reveal a great deal about
a person’s values and how they live their life. For more information on VALS and SRI
see www.sric-bi.com.
Go to the Web site and find the link to VALS. See the VALS survey link and take the
VALS survey (it only takes a few minutes). List the VALS segment that you match and
describe the characteristics of your segment. What surprises (if any) were there for you?
Go to the link that describes the VALS Types. After reading about the various types,
which types would be the easiest to manage? The most difficult? Explain.
The instructor will ask everyone to indicate their VALS type and list the results on the
board. Find another person that has your same VALS type from the list. Briefly interview
them to see what you have in common and any clear differences. Comment on these
similarities and differences. By knowing what you now know about your partner (and his
or her VALS type), what managerial conclusions could you now draw?
Instructor Discussion
Students generally enjoy this exercise and can prepare it prior to class. They will receive
a nice printout from SRI indicating their VALS segment with a recap of the
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characteristics of a person from that segment. However, before assigning this project, it is
recommended that the instructor visit the Web site to insure that all links are still as
described above as these links often change. By examining the brief characterizations of
the various VALS types, students should be able to see that the following generalizations
can be made:
Actualizers—successful with many resources open to change
Fulfilled—satisfied, reflective, comfortable, practical
Achievers—career-oriented, avoid risk, self-discovery
Experiencers—impulsive, young, offbeat, love risk
Believers—strong principles, favor proven brands
Strivers—like achievers, but with fewer resources, need approval
Makers—action-oriented, self-sufficiency, do-it-yourselfers
Strugglers—bottom-of-ladder, immediate gratification
Though VALS has been used to study consumer lifestyles it can also tell us something
about a person’s values that can then be studied by managers. Students will enjoy talking
among themselves about their characteristics.
EXPLORING OB TOPICS ON THE
WORLD WIDE WEB
This exercise contributes to Learning Objective: Summarize the relationship between attitudes and
behavior, Compare and contrast the major job attitudes; Learning Outcome: Explain the relationship
between personality traits and individual behavior; and AACSB Learning Goal: Reflective thinking skills.
Search Engines are our navigational tool to explore the WWW. Some commonly used
search engines are:
www.excite.com
www.google.com
www.yahoo.com
www.lycos.com
www.hotbot.com
www.bing.com
1. Jeff Van Duzer wrote an excellent piece on ethics in business, which can be
accessed at http://www.ethix.org/article.php3?id=212. Write a two page paper
relating his three pragmatic factors (speed, spin and stuff) to your life as a student
or employee. Have you felt the pressure he talks about? Do you think they are
contributors to ethical lapses as he suggests? Do you think the strategies he
recommends are ones you could apply to your life as a student or employee? For
example, you might find donating money at this time unpractical, but maybe you
are donating time as a tutor or at other campus activities.
2. How satisfied are you with your job (or a job you had in the past)? Take a job
satisfaction quiz at http://www.humanlinks.com/orgsn/job_satisfaction.htm.
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a. Job satisfaction—what are people saying about their job satisfaction? Try
these web sites to find out more about what American workers are saying:
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19980601/946.html
http://www.computerworld.com/careertopics/careers/story/0,10801,61742,
00.html
http://www.humanlinks.com/orgsn/job_satisfaction.htm
Are you surprised at what you read? Write a paragraph or two on the three most
important facts you learned from these web sites. Bring to class for further
discussion.
3. What do American workers value? At Workforce.com you will find several
articles on the topic. (You will need to complete a free registration.)
http://www.workforce.com.
4. What is the state of employee loyalty? Do organizations even care if employees
are loyal? What are the consequences if they are not? Conduct a web search on
employee loyalty and write a two-page paper answering the above questions.
www.workforce.com has several excellent articles on the topic. (You will need to
complete a free registration to access them.)
5. Organizations often conduct attitude surveys of their employees. What is it that
they want to know? Go to: http://www.hr-survey.com/EmployeeAttitude.htm to
learn more about employee attitude surveys. Write a paragraph or two on what
you think would be the three most important topics would be to include on an
attitude survey and why.
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