I
n today’s temp economy, there are self-employed, part-time, contract, micro-entrepreneur, temporary, and freelance workers. One example is Brad Stone of Bloomberg Businessweek, pictured here, who worked as a micro- entrepreneur through task-brokerage firms TaskRabbit, Postmates, and Cherry. These may seem like dream jobs–quick paychecks,work-when-you-want-to hours, and ultra-flexibility. But how satis- fied with their jobs are people who have these arrangements?
It depends on your expectations, it seems. Recent research in Canada studied the concept of work congruence, or the match between the number of hours a person wants to work and the number of hours the person is offered work. The study found that as work congruence increased, especially when the number of hours increased for individuals who wanted more hours, job satisfaction increased.
Finding a job where the hours fit your wishes seems like an obvious key to a satisfying job, but it’s not the whole story. For one thing, some contingent workers get enough hours, but in the form of unpaid overtime—meaning extra time they put into the job, but for which they receive no pay. Unpaid overtime is common
in many countries. According to a study of 4,530 workers in 735 workplaces in Britain, part-timers—who were 27 percent of the workforce—worked almost 10 unpaid overtime hours per week, particularly in professional/ managerial jobs. The study also found that part-timers who worked unpaid overtime were more likely to lose their job satisfaction, be absent, and quit than full-time workers who worked extra hours without additional pay.
3-1
Contrast the three components of an attitude.3-2
Summarize the relationship between attitudes and behavior.3-3
Compare the major job attitudes.3-4
Define job satisfaction.3-5
Summarize the main causes of job satisfaction.3-6
Identify three outcomes of job satisfaction.3-7
Identify four employee responses to job dissatisfaction.MyManagement
MyManagement
If your professor has chosen to assign this, go to the Assignments section of mymanagementlab.com to complete the chapter warm up.After studying this chapter, you should be able to:
In the United States, where contingent workers make up 20 percent of the workforce, job satisfaction suffers from a lack of paid hours. Many contingent workers say they cannot reliably find enough paid hours to support themselves and they feel insecure as a result. Professor Arne Kallenberg acknowledged, “Work has become much more insecure, much more precarious.”
One large study in China found that job insecurity is strongly negatively related to job satisfaction, meaning the more insecure you are about your work situation, the less satisfied in your job you are likely to be. As a help, the U.S. Affordable Care Act has provided a measure of security for millions of people not covered by an employer’s medical insurance plan, and some workforce brokerage-type firms like TaskRabbit are offering their “micro-en- trepreneurs” benefits such as a guaranteed hourly wage. “If we want people to feel comfortable moving from job to job in a very flexible, decentralized economy, they need to have some basic protections that allow them to do that,” said Jacob Hacker, a Yale political scientist.
While benefits are helpful, some scholars argue that for millions of con- tingent workers, security, and thus job satisfaction, will come only from work congruency—the availability of jobs and schedules that provide enough paid hours to meet workers’ needs. Stone agrees. “My three-day haul won’t feed my family,” he observed in counting his roughly $67/day earnings as a micro-entrepreneur. Freelance worker Heather Burdette, who has been piec- ing together a career since 2008, had to declare bankruptcy in 2005. “I’m actually more secure right now,” she said, “because I understand that the bottom can fall out at any time.”
Sources: N. Conway and J. Sturges, “Investigating Unpaid Overtime Working among the Part- Time Workforce,” British Journal of Management 25 (2014): 755–71; B. Y. Lee, J. Wang, and J. Weststar, “Work Hour Congruence: The Effect on Job Satisfaction and Absenteeism,” Inter- national Journal of Human Resource Management 26, no. 5 (2015): 657–75; B. Stone, “My Life as a Task Rabbit,” Bloomberg Businessweek (September 13, 2012), www.businessweek .com/articles/2012-09-13/my-life-as-a-taskrabbit#p1; L. Weber, “For Digital Temps, a Safety Net Emerges,” The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2014, B7; and I. U. Zeytinoglu, M. Denton, S.
Davies, A. Baumann, J. Blythe, and L. Boos, “Retaining Nurses in their Employing Hospitals and in the Profession: Effects of Job Preference, Unpaid Overtime, Importance of Earnings and Stress,” Health Policy 79, no. 1 (2006): 57–72.
I
t’s almost a truism to say that a job that fits you is one that satisfies you. As the vignette shows, however, what makes a satisfying job is a bit more complex.What factors besides work schedule compatibility and job security affect job attitudes?1 Does having a satisfying job really matter? Before we tackle these important questions, it’s important to define what we mean by attitudes gener- ally, and job attitudes in particular.
Attitudes
Attitudes are evaluative statements—either favorable or unfavorable—about ob- jects, people, or events. They reflect how we feel about something. When you say “I like my job,” you are expressing your attitude about your work.
Attitudes are complex. If you ask people about their attitude toward religion, Lady Gaga, or an organization, you may get a simple response, but the underly- ing reasons are probably complicated. To fully understand attitudes, we must consider their fundamental properties or components.
Typically, researchers assume attitudes have three components: cognition, affect, and behavior.2 The statement “My pay is low” is a cognitive component of an attitude—a description of or belief in the way things are. It sets the stage for the more critical part of an attitude—its affective component. Affect is the emo- tional or feeling segment of an attitude reflected in the statement, “I am angry over how little I’m paid.” Affect can lead to behavioral outcomes. The behavioral component of an attitude describes an intention to behave a certain way toward someone or something—as in, “I’m going to look for another job that pays better.”
Viewing attitudes as having three components—cognition, affect, and behavior—helps understand their complexity and the potential relationship between attitudes and behavior. For example, imagine you realized that someone treated you unfairly. Aren’t you likely to have feelings about that, occurring virtually instantaneously with the realization? Thus, cognition and affect are intertwined.
Exhibit 3-1 illustrates how the three components of an attitude are related.
In this example, an employee didn’t get a promotion he thought he deserved.
3-1
Contrast the three components of an attitude.attitudes Evaluative statements or judg- ments concerning objects, people, or events.
affective component The emotional or feeling segment of an attitude.
Watch It!
If your professor has assigned this, go to the Assignments section of mymanagementlab.com to complete the video exercise titled Gawker Media: Attitudes and Job Satisfaction.
the components of an attitude
Exhibit 3-1
Negative attitude toward supervisor Cognitive = evaluation
My supervisor gave a promotion to a coworker who deserved it less than I did. My supervisor is unfair.
Affective = feeling I dislike my supervisor!
Cognition, affect, and behavior are closely related.
Behavioral = action I’m looking for other work; I’ve complained about my supervisor to anyone who would listen.
behavioral component An intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or something.
cognitive component The opinion or belief segment of an attitude.
His attitude toward his supervisor is illustrated as follows: The employee thought he deserved the promotion (cognition), he strongly dislikes his super- visor (affect), and he has complained and taken action (behavior). Although we often think cognition causes affect, which then causes behavior, in reality these components are difficult to separate.
In organizations, attitudes are important for their behavioral component.
If workers believe, for example, that managers, auditors, and engineers are in a conspiracy to make employees work harder for less money, we should try to understand how this attitude formed, how it impacts job behavior, and how it might be changed.
Attitudes and Behavior
Early research on attitudes assumed they were causally related to behavior—that is, the attitudes people hold determine what they do. However, one researcher—
Leon Festinger—argued that attitudes follow behavior. Other researchers have agreed that attitudes predict future behavior.3
Did you ever notice how people change what they say so it doesn’t contradict what they do? Perhaps a friend of yours consistently argued that her apartment complex was better than yours until another friend in your complex asked her to move in with him; once she moved to your complex, you noticed her attitude toward her former apartment became more critical. Cases of attitude following behavior illustrate the effects of cognitive dissonance,4 contradictions individu- als might perceive between their attitudes and their behavior.
People seek consistency among their attitudes, and between their attitudes and their behavior.5 Any form of inconsistency is uncomfortable, and individu- als will therefore attempt to reduce it. People seek a stable state, which is a minimum of dissonance. When there is a dissonance, people will alter either the attitudes or the behavior, or they will develop a rationalization for the dis- crepancy. Recent research found, for instance, that the attitudes of employees who had emotionally challenging work events improved after they talked about their experiences with coworkers. Social sharing helped these workers adjust their attitudes to behavioral expectations.6
No individual can avoid dissonance. You know texting while walking is unsafe, but you do it anyway and hope nothing bad happens. Or you give someone advice you have trouble following yourself. The desire to reduce dissonance depends on three factors, including the importance of the elements creating dissonance and the degree of influence we believe we have over the elements. The third factor is the rewards of dissonance; high rewards accompanying high dissonance tend to reduce tension inherent in the dissonance (dissonance is less distressing if accom- panied by something good, such as a higher pay raise than expected). Individuals are more motivated to reduce dissonance when the attitudes are important or when they believe the dissonance is due to something they can control.
The most powerful moderators of the attitudes relationship are the impor- tance of the attitude, its correspondence to behavior, its accessibility, the presence of social pressures, and whether a person has direct experience with the attitude.7 Important attitudes reflect our fundamental values, self-interest, or identifica- tion with individuals or groups we value. These attitudes tend to show a strong relationship to our behavior. However, discrepancies between attitudes and behaviors tend to occur when social pressures to behave in certain ways hold exceptional power, as in most organizations. You’re more likely to remember attitudes you frequently express, and attitudes that our memories can easily access are more likely to predict our behavior. The attitude–behavior relation- ship is also likely to be much stronger if an attitude refers to something with which we have direct personal experience.
3-2
Summarize the relationship between attitudes and behavior.cognitive dissonance Any incompatibil- ity between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes.
Westin Hotels strives for consistency between employee attitudes and behavior through a global wellness program to help employees improve their health. Shown here is Westin’s executive chef, Frank Tujague, whose cooking demonstrations give employees direct experience with healthy ingredients and cooking techniques.
Source: Diane Bondareff/AP Images
Y
ou are peacefully at work in your cu- bicle when your coworker invades your space, sitting on your desk and nearly overturning your coffee. As she talks about the morning meeting, do you:a) stop what you’re doing and listen; or b) explain that you’re in the middle of a project and ask to talk some other time?
Your answer may reflect your at- titude toward office talk, but it should be guided by whether your participation is ethical. Sometimes, office conversa- tions can help employees to process information and find solutions to prob- lems. Other times, office talk can be damaging to everyone. Consider the scenario from two perspectives: over- sharing and venting.
More than 60 percent of 514 profes- sional employees recently surveyed in- dicated they encounter individuals who frequently share too much about them- selves. Some are self-centered, narcis- sistic, and “think you want to know all the details of their lives,” according to psychologist Alan Hilfer.
Despite the drawbacks, oversharers can be strong contributors. Billy Bauer, director of marketing for manufacturer Royce Leather, is an oversharer who boasts about his latest sales—which may push other employees to work harder. Oversharers can also contribute to teamwork when they share personal stories related to organizational goals, according to a Harvard Business Re- view article.
Now let’s look at this the other way. According to Yale Professor Amy Wrzesniewski, organization-lovers are often “the first people to become of- fended” when they think the organiza- tion is making wrong decisions. They can become emotional, challenging, and outspoken about their views. If they are not heard, they can increase their venting or withdraw.
Yet organization-lovers can be top- performing employees: they are often highly engaged, inspiring, and strong team players who are more likely to work harder than others. Venting their
frustrations helps restore a positive at- titude to keep them high performing.
Research indicates that venting to co- workers can also build camaraderie.
Since guidelines for acceptable office conversation are almost non- existent in the contemporary age of openness, personalization, and trans- parency, you must decide what kinds of