Week 5, Monday Lecture Outline

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?

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Revised - November 4, 1996