Attitudes toward work:
Job satisfaction

Week 5, Monday

Psychology 360
Outline
I. Attitudes and job satisfaction
II. Need-satisfaction
III. Social information processing
IV. Dispositionalism
Attitudes and Job Satisfaction
General:
feelings, beliefs, and behavioral dispositions
Work-related attitudes:
feelings about job
feelings about work setting
feelings about co-workers

Job satisfaction:
 individuals' reactions toward their jobs
does influence absenteeism, turnover, and citizenship behavior
does not influence job performance
Need-satisfaction
From Maslow et al. (50s - 60s) :
people have needs
jobs vary in their ability to fulfill needs
satisfaction varies as a function of the discrepancy between needs and the ability of jobs to fulfill needs

Implications:
jobs have objective characteristics
manipulation of these characteristics can change level of satisfaction (e.g., job design)
Social Information Processing
Failure of need-satisfaction model:
attitudes not related to need fulfillment
From Salancik and Pfeffer (70s):
experience and social environment provide information about jobs
salience and relevance of information varies
satisfaction will be constructed as a function of social information

Implications:
jobs do not have objective characteristics
satisfaction is outcome of interpretation of environmental cues
manipulation of environment may influence satisfaction
Dispositionalism
Return of individual level variables:
evidence of the persistence of dispositional characteristics
From Staw et al. (80s):
people have stable tendencies toward positive or negative evaluation
social environment provides information about jobs
processing of this information is consistent with disposition

Implications:
jobs do not have objective characteristics
external interventions to improve satisfaction will have limited success
personnel selection may be more crucial than job design
Who Is Right?
Tension in psychology:
individual VS contextual
Progress in science:
agreement on paradigm
revolt against paradigm
paradigmatic shift?
Copyright © 1996, The Regents of the University of Michigan, All rights reserved.
Revised - November 4, 1996