H9. Feelings About Work: Job Attitudes and Emotions. Industrial and organizational Psychology

Subsequently a three-component commitment perspective was developed (Meyer, Allen, & Smith, 1993). The three components of commitment are:

-Affective -Continuance -Normative

Meyer et al. (1993) discussed the nature and origins of the three components of commitment. Figure 9.5 shows the major influences on each. As you can see, there are different factors involved in each component. -Affective commitment arises from ...... -Continuance commitment is produced by .... -Normative commitment comes from .......

-Affective commitment arises from job conditions and met expectations. That is, did the job provide the rewards that the employee expected? -Continuance commitment is produced by the benefits accrued from working for the organization and by the lack of available alternative jobs. -Normative commitment comes from the employee's personal values and from the obligations that the person feels toward the employer. These obligations come from favors that the organization has done, such as paying the person's school expenses.

-Affective commitment occurs when ...... -Continuance commitment exists when ...... -Normative commitment comes from ......

-Affective commitment occurs when the employee wishes to remain with the orga- nization because of an emotional attachment. -Continuance commitment exists when a person must remain with the organization because he or she needs the benefits and salary or cannot find another acceptable job. -Normative commitment comes from the values of the employee. The person believes that he or she owes it to the organization to remain out of a sense that this is the right thing to do.

There are both individual and organizational factors that affect emotional labor and its possible impact on employees. -First, it has been found that ..... -Furthermore, the relationship between ..... -Furthermore, the negative effects of .......

-First, it has been found that women (H. A. M. Johnson & Spector, 2007) and older workers (Dahling & Perez, 2010) are more likely to engage in deep acting than men and younger workers. -Furthermore, the relationship between acting and well-being differs by gender and personality. The negative effects of surface acting are greater for women than men (H. A. M. Johnson & Spector, 2007) and for introverts than extraverts (Judge et al., 2009). -Furthermore, the negative effects of emotional labor are reduced when the employee has high levels of autonomy and control (Grandey, Fisk, & Steiner, 2005; H. A. M. Johnson & Spector, 2007). Having control over the situation, such as being given latitude in how to deal with a rude customer, will tend to reduce negative effects, presumably because the employee does not have to fake being happy while being treated rudely by a customer.

Although it is clear that performance and satisfaction are related (Schleicher, Watt, & Greguras, 2004), there are two opposite explanations.:

-First, satisfaction might lead to performance. That is, people who like their jobs work harder and therefore perform better. -Second, performance might lead to satisfaction. People who perform well are likely to benefit from that performance, and those benefits could enhance satisfaction. A well-performing person might receive more pay and recognition, which might increase job satisfaction.

Although these studies show that people in different countries may have different feelings about work, they don't shed much light on the reasons. One explanation for these job satisfaction differences involves basic values that vary across countries. Hofstede (2001) assessed four important cultural values in 50 countries. Although individuals differed on values within each country, there were mean differences that relate to important variables in the workplace. The culture values are:

-Individualism/collectivism -Masculinity -Power distance -Uncertainty avoidance

Job Characteristics Job characteristics refer to the content and nature of job tasks themselves. There are only a few characteristics studied as contributors to job satisfaction. Five are part of Hackman and Oldham's (1976) influential job characteristics theory (see Chapter 10 for additional details of the theory):

-Skill variety: The number of different skills necessary to do a job; -Task identity: Whether or not an employee does an entire job or a piece of a job; -Task significance: The impact a job has on other people; -Autonomy: The freedom employees have to do their jobs as they see fit; and -Task feedback: The extent to which it is obvious to employees that they are doing their jobs correctly. Combined these five core characteristics define the scope or complexity and challenge of a job. It is assumed by job characteristics theory that high scope leads to job satisfaction and low scope leads to boredom and dissatisfaction.

The three hypotheses lead to contradictory predictions about the correlation between job and life satisfaction. -Spillover predicts a ..... -Compensation predicts a ...... -Segmentation predicts ......

-Spillover predicts a positive correlation in that satisfaction at work will affect satisfaction in other areas of life. -Compensation predicts a negative correlation because dissatisfaction in one area of life will be compensated for by satisfaction in another. -Segmentation predicts no correlation because people keep satisfaction with different areas of life separated. Rain et al. (1991) pointed out that research has consis- tently found a positive correlation between job and life satisfaction. Thus the spillover hypothesis is the only one supported by research.

Three hypotheses have been proposed about how job and life satisfaction might affect one another (Rain, Lane, & Steiner, 1991). The spillover hypothesis suggests that satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) in one area of life affects or spills over to another. Thus problems and dissatisfaction at home can affect satisfaction with work, whereas problems and dissatisfaction at work can affect satisfaction with home. The compensation hypothesis says that dissatisfaction in one area of life will be compensated for in another. A person with a dissatisfying job will seek satisfaction in other aspects of life. A person with a dissatisfying home life might seek satisfaction in work. The segmentation hypothesis states that people compartmentalize their lives and that satisfaction in one area of life has no relation to satisfaction in another.

-The spillover hypothesis -The compensation hypothesis -The segmentation hypothesis

-The spillover hypothesis -The compensation hypothesis -The segmentation hypothesis

-The spillover hypothesis suggests that satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) in one area of life affects or spills over to another. Thus problems and dissatisfaction at home can affect satisfaction with work, whereas problems and dissatisfaction at work can affect satisfaction with home. -The compensation hypothesis says that dissatisfaction in one area of life will be compensated for in another. A person with a dissatisfying job will seek satisfaction in other aspects of life. A person with a dissatisfying home life might seek satisfaction in work. -The segmentation hypothesis states that people compartmentalize their lives and that satisfaction in one area of life has no relation to satisfaction in another.

Job Descriptive Index (JDI) Of all the job satisfaction scales available, the Job Descriptive Index (JDI) (P. C. Smith, Kendall, & Hulin, 1969) has been the most popular with researchers. It is also the most thoroughly and carefully validated. This scale assesses five facets:

-Work -Pay -Promotion opportunities -Supervision -Coworkers

The items tap the three aspects of commitment—

-acceptance of goals, -willingness to work hard, and -intention to stay with the organization.

Three components of commitment have been identified as

-affective, -continuance, and -normative. Organizational commitment has many of the same correlates as job satisfaction, including job satisfaction, job performance, turnover, stress, and justice.

POTENTIAL EFFECTS OF JOB SATISFACTION A number of organizationally relevant variables are thought to be the result of job satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Some are behaviors that have an important impact on the well-being of organizations. Three of these are

-job performance, -turnover, and -employee absence. Job satisfaction is also linked to variables that are of direct relevance to the health and well-being of employees.

These studies showing consistency in job satisfaction over time support the idea that personality is important, but they don't shed much light on the nature of relevant personality traits. Quite a few specific traits have been studied, with particular attention being paid to two of them—

-negative affectivity and -locus of control.

The original global perspective is based on the work of Mowday, Steers, and Porter (1979), which considers organizational commitment to be a global feeling that involves three things:

1. An acceptance of the organization's goals 2. A willingness to work hard for the organization 3. The desire to stay with the organization

TABLE 9.2 Job Satisfaction of Managers in 24 Countries, Listed From Most to Least Satisfied

1. Canada 2. Sweden 3. Israel 4. Estonia 5. India 6. United States 7. Belgium 8. Germany 9. New Zealand 10. Ukraine 11. Slovenia 12. Poland 13. Spain 14. Taiwan 15. Brazil 16. Australia 17. France 18. Bulgaria 19. Romania 20. South Africa 21. People's Republic of China 22. Hong Kong 23. Japan 24. England

Multinational surveys have found that job satisfaction levels are not the same across countries. Pichler and Wallace (2009) compared mean job satisfaction among samples from 27 European countries. They found that satisfaction was highest in Scandinavia (Denmark, Finland, and Sweden), Germany, and Austria and was lowest in

Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Slovakia, Poland, and Latvia). Spector, Cooper, Sanchez, O'Driscoll, Sparks et al. (2001) compared job satisfaction levels among managers in 24 countries across the globe and found significant differences. Table 9.2 lists the countries in order from highest to lowest satisfaction, and shows that Americans came in sixth (although there were no significant differences among the top nine). Managers from Asian countries (China and Japan) tended to be lower.

CHAPTER SUMMARY Job satisfaction is the extent to which people like or dislike their jobs (global satisfaction) or aspects of their jobs (facet satisfaction). It is usually measured with questionnaires administered to employees. Several popular job satisfaction scales are available:

Job Descriptive Index (JDI) Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) Job in General Scale (JIG)

TABLE 9.1 Common Job Satisfaction Facets

Pay Job conditions Promotion opportunities Nature of the work itself Fringe benefits Communication Supervision Security Coworkers

Assessment of Organizational Commitment Assessment of Organizational Commitment Organizational commitment is measured with self-report scales not unlike those used to assess job satisfaction. Four items from the most popular scale, developed by Mowday et al. (1979), are shown in Table 9.8. The items tap the three aspects of commitment—acceptance of goals, willingness to work hard, and intention to stay with the organization. All three components relate strongly to one another, and combined they indicate global commitment.

TABLE 9.8 Four items From the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire -I find that my values and the organization's values are very similar. -I am proud to tell others that I am part of this organization. -I could just as well be working for a different organization as long as the type of work was similar. -This organization really inspires the very best in me in the way of job performance.

The three components in the Meyer et al. (1993) conception of commitment can be assessed with a scale they developed. Table 9.9 contains two of the items for each component. As opposed to the Mowday et al. (1979) scale, the components in the Meyer et al. (1993) scale produce separate scores. Research with the scale has found support for the idea that the three types of commitment are separate variables (Dunham, Grube, & Castaneda, 1994). Hackett, Bycio, and Hausdorf (1994) noted that the Mowday et al. (1979) scale assesses mainly affective commitment. It correlates strongly with the affective commitment subscale but not with the continuance and normative subscales of the Meyer et al. (1993) scale.

TABLE 9.9 Six Items From the Meyer, Allen, and Smith (1993) Three-Component Organizational Commitment Scale -Affective Commitment I would be very happy to spend the rest of my career with this organization I really feel as if this organization's problems are my own -Continuance Commitment Right now, staying with my organization is a matter of necessity as much as desire It would be very hard for me to leave my organization right now, even if I wanted to -Normative Commitment I do not feel any obligation to remain with my current employer Even if it were to my advantage, I do not feel it would be right to leave my organization now

9 Feelings About Work: Job Attitudes and Emotions CHAPTER 9 OUTLINE

THE NATURE OF JOB SATISFACTION HOW PEOPLE FEEL ABOUT THEIR JOBS THE ASSESSMENT OF JOB SATISFACTION Job Descriptive Index (JDI) Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) Job in General Scale (JIG) Is Global Satisfaction the Sum of Facets? ANTECEDENTS OF JOB SATISFACTION Environmental Antecedents of Job Satisfaction Personal Antecedents of Job Satisfaction Person-Job Fit POTENTIAL EFFECTS OF JOB SATISFACTION Job Satisfaction and Job Performance Job Satisfaction and Turnover Job Satisfaction and Absence Health and Well-Being Job and Life Satisfaction ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT Assessment of Organizational Commitment Organizational Commitment and Other Variables EMOTIONS AT WORK Causes and Consequences of Emotions at Work Emotional Labor

On the other hand, if we have a sample of people who all do the same job, those who make more money should be more satisfied. Research support for this hypothesis comes from two studies. Spector (1985) found

a mean correlation of only .17 between salary level and pay satisfaction in three heterogeneous samples in which employees held different jobs. Rice, Phillips, and McFarlin (1990) found a much larger .50 correlation between pay and job satisfaction in a sample of mental health professionals holding the same jobs.

The global approach treats job satisfaction as

a single, overall feeling toward the job. Many studies assess people's overall satisfaction, and many of the findings discussed in this chapter reflect that variable.

Organizational Commitment and Other Variables Organizational commitment has been included in studies involving many organizational variables. Cooper-Hakim and Viswesvaran (2005) conducted a meta-analysis of nearly 1,000 studies, relating commitment to several hypothesized variables proposed as con- sequences. Table 9.10 summarizes their results, relating the three components of com- mitment to four important variables. Job satisfaction relates most strongly to

affective commitment, which isn't surprising considering that both variables are attitudes about the job. Job performance also relates most strongly and positively to affective commitment, at about the same level as does job satisfaction, as was discussed earlier. Continuance commitment relates negatively to job performance, although the relationship is rather small. These results suggest that people who are working because of an emotional attachment will tend to perform better, but those who are working because they feel they have to will actually perform worse.

A moderator variable

affects the relation between two other variables. One might find that a particular job variable relates to job satisfaction for people at one level of a person variable and not for people at another level. For example, men might react differently than women to a job condition. Thus there might be a positive correlation between the job condition and job satisfaction for men and no correlation for women. We would say that gender has moderated the relation between the job condition and job satisfaction. It determines whether or not the two variables are correlated.

Job satisfaction, however, is not the only variable that reflects how people feel about work. Organizational commitment is

another attitude that concerns people's feelings of attachment to their jobs and organizations. Feelings also include both positive and negative emotions that are experienced at work, such as anger over unfair treatment and joy over receiving a promotion.

Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) Another popular job satisfaction scale is the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) (Weiss, Dawis, Lofquist, & England, 1966). This scale comes in two forms, a 100-item long version and a 20-item short version. Both versions have items that ask about 20 facets of job satisfaction, but facet scores are computed only for the long form. The short form is used to

assess either global satisfaction or intrinsic and extrinsic satisfaction. -Intrinsic satisfaction refers to the nature of the job tasks themselves and how people feel about the work they do. -Extrinsic satisfaction concerns other aspects of the work situation, such as fringe benefits and pay. Both types of satisfaction are the combination of several facets.

One possible reason for the small relation between satisfaction and absence is that a person can

be absent for many reasons (Kohler & Mathieu, 1993), including employee illness, family member illness (especially children), personal business, and fatigue, as well as just not feeling like going to work. Whereas some of these reasons might be associated with job satisfaction (not feeling like going to work), others probably are not (child being sick). Thus overall absence is not likely to have a strong relation with job satisfaction. Absence due to certain reasons will likely be more strongly related (Kohler & Mathieu, 1993).

It is possible that externals experience their jobs in a similar way. There are other mechanisms that are equally plausible. For example, Spector (1982) hypothesized that one reason for the higher satisfaction of internals is their higher job performance. Individuals who perform better might be....

better rewarded and thus like their jobs better. Personality might also be related to job choice. Perhaps people with certain personality traits choose better jobs and therefore have higher satisfaction. Clearly research is needed to determine why personality relates to job satisfaction.

Uncertainty avoidance reflects the level of

comfort in situations that are unpredictable. In organizations, people can maintain predictability by adhering to formal procedures and rules; thus in countries high on this dimension, organizations tend to be very rule oriented. Countries highest on this dimension are Greece and Portugal, while the lowest are Singapore and Jamaica. The United States is in the lower third on uncertainty avoidance.

The requirement to engage in emotional labor can have positive effects on

customers of customer service employees but negative effects on employees, particularly if they fake the emotions (surface acting) and have low control over the service encounter.

Power distance is the tolerance people have for power and status differences among levels of an organization and society. Countries with high power distance tend to produce managers who

demand obedience from subordinates. Latin countries, such as Guatemala and Panama, tend to be high, while Austria and Israel are lowest. The United States is in the lower half of the scale.

Personal Antecedents of Job Satisfaction The majority of studies of the causes of job satisfaction have taken an environmental perspective. Some researchers, however, feel that personal characteristics are also important in determining job satisfaction (e.g., Staw & Cohen-Charash, 2005). Personal characteristics include

demographics (e.g., age, gender, and race), as well as personality.

The form of emotional labor performed can affect not only the employee but also customers who observe it. Groth, Thurau, and Walsh (2009) studied the reactions that customers have to the emotional labor of customer service employees. Subjects were students who were asked to complete a survey during a customer service encounter and to request that the customer service employee who waited on them complete a parallel survey asking about their emotional labor. Results showed that customers can

detect whether the employee is engaging in deep or surface acting. More important is the finding that deep acting results in more positive perceptions of the service encounter. Thus it would seem that only deep acting can really accomplish the organizational purpose of emotional labor by enhancing the quality of the service encounter for the customer.

The facet approach permits a more complete picture of job satisfaction. An individual typically has

different levels of satisfaction with the various facets. He or she might be very dissatisfied with pay and fringe benefits but at the same time be very satisfied with the nature of the work and supervisors. This is a typical pattern for Americans, as we will see in the next section.

-The compensation hypothesis says that

dissatisfaction in one area of life will be compensated for in another. A person with a dissatisfying job will seek satisfaction in other aspects of life. A person with a dissatisfying home life might seek satisfaction in work.

HOW PEOPLE FEEL ABOUT THEIR JOBS As noted earlier, surveys show that the majority of Americans like their jobs (Society for Human Resource Management, 2009), but this doesn't mean they like all aspects of their jobs equally. The JSS is a scale that assesses

eight popular facets of job satisfaction. The norms are based on the job satisfaction scores of 36,380 employees from more than 100 organizations throughout the United States. Americans are typically very satisfied with their supervisors, coworkers, and nature of the work they do. They are less satisfied with rewards, such as pay, promotion opportunities, and fringe benefits.

Research has also linked job satisfaction to several employee behaviors. Lack of satisfaction seems to be a cause of

employee turnover. It is related modestly to job performance and slightly to absence, although it is not clear that satisfaction is the cause of either.

-First, it has been found that women (H. A. M. Johnson & Spector, 2007) and older workers (Dahling & Perez, 2010) are more likely to

engage in deep acting than men and younger workers.

ANTECEDENTS OF JOB SATISFACTION What makes people like or dislike their jobs? This question has been addressed in hundreds of research studies. Most of them have taken an

environmental perspective. They have investigated features of jobs and organizations that lead employees to be satisfied or dissatisfied. Several studies have shown, however, that people with the same jobs and highly similar job conditions can vary considerably in their satisfaction.

National polls of American workers have typically found that the majority are satisfied with their jobs. For example, the Society for Human Resource Management (2009) conducted a 2009 survey that found 86% of employees were satisfied with their jobs. A 2002 poll suggests that Canadians are

even more satisfied than Americans, with 92% of respondents saying they like their jobs (Shields, 2006).

Individuals who surface act experience more

exhaustion than individuals who do not. Individuals who deep act experience less exhaustion than individuals who do not. Finally Yanchus, Eby, Lance, and Drollinger (2010) found that surface acting is associated with low levels of life satisfaction.

People who believe that fate, luck, or powerful others control reinforcements are termed

externals. Internals have been found to be more satisfied with their jobs than externals (Ng, Sorensen, & Eby, 2006; Q. Wang, Bowling, & Eschleman, 2010).

-Furthermore, the relationship between acting and well-being differs by

gender and personality. The negative effects of surface acting are greater for women than men (H. A. M. Johnson & Spector, 2007) and for introverts than extraverts (Judge et al., 2009).

Each of the MSQ items is a statement that describes a facet. The employee is asked to indicate how satisfied he or she is with each one. For example, an item for the Activity facet is "Being able to keep busy all the time." The overall scale has been shown to have

good reliability and evidence for validity. Several researchers, however, have questioned how the items have been classified into the intrinsic and extrinsic groups (C. A. Schriesheim, Powers, Scandura, Gardiner, et al., 1993).

In the job characteristics area, many studies have attempted to find the sorts of people who would react most positively to high-scope jobs (i.e., those high on the five core job characteristics of Hackman and Oldham, 1976). One personality characteristic that comes from Hackman and Oldham's (1976) theory is ...

growth need strength (GNS).

Pay satisfaction is affected by

how an individual's salary compares to those of others in the same job rather than to those of people in general. More direct support for the link with fairness comes from the research on justice and pay satisfaction. In their meta-analysis, Cohen-Charash and Spector (2001) found that distributive and procedural justice (see Chapter 8) are strongly correlated with pay satisfaction, with correlations of .58 and .45, respectively.

Emotional labor has been shown to have both positive and negative effects on employees, depending on a number of factors. Perhaps the most important is

how emotional labor is performed. Deep acting is a form of emotional labor in which the individual experiences the emotion he or she is trying to display. Surface acting, on the other hand, is a form of emotional labor in which the person fakes feeling good, while hiding his or her real feelings.

Job Satisfaction and Absence Conventional wisdom suggests that absence from work is the by-product of employee job dissatisfaction. People who dislike their jobs will be more likely to avoid work than people who like their jobs. Several meta-analyses have looked at this question, and they show that the connection between job satisfaction and absence is

inconsistent and usually quite small. For example, Bowling and Hammond (2008) found a mean correlation of −.12 between absence and global job satisfaction. Tharenou (1993), on the other hand, found correlations as high as −.34 between absence and job satisfaction in a sample of Australian blue-collar workers. Why some studies find stronger absence-job satisfaction correlations than others is not entirely clear, but it seems that they can be related under some circumstances.

As employees get older, their average tenure increases, and so many of them will be past the honeymoon period and experience lowered job satisfaction. Over time, however, job satisfaction will

increase, perhaps as employees adjust to working life.

Job Satisfaction and Turnover Quitting the job, or turnover , has been tied to job satisfaction. Many studies have shown that dissatisfied employees are more likely than satisfied employees to quit their jobs (Blau, 2007). Correlations between job satisfaction and turnover have been interpreted as

indicating the effects of satisfaction on behavior.

One must be cautious in generalizing these organizational commitment findings to other countries. Robert, Probst, Martocchio, Drasgow, and Lawler (2000) surveyed employees of a multinational company in four countries: India, Mexico, Poland, and the United States. Organizational commitment correlated strongly with ......

intent to quit in the United States (as expected) and Poland. However, the correlation was somewhat smaller in Mexico, and it was nonsignificant in India. Apparently Indians and Mexicans who have low commitment are less inclined to quit their jobs than Americans and Poles who have low commitment.

Individualism is the extent to which people see themselves as autonomous and focus on their own interests and needs rather than those of others. Collectivism is the opposite, where people see themselves as

interconnected to others with a focus on the groups to which they belong. Western nations such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States are high on individualism, while Asian countries (China and Korea) and Latin countries (Ecuador and Guatemala) tend to be high on collectivism.

The JDI has been used frequently by organizational researchers. The extensive body of research using the scale provides extensive evidence for its validity. The biggest limitation of the scale is that

it has only five subscales and might not cover all facets of the job that one might wish to study.

Research has linked job satisfaction to a number of job environment variables. It has been shown to correlate with

job characteristics, pay, and justice. Job satisfaction has also been found to correlate with personal characteristics, including age, and with various personality variables, such as negative affectivity and locus of control.

Several studies have compared the job satisfaction of Black and White employees in the United States. Some of these studies have found that Blacks have slightly lower satisfaction (Greenhaus et al., 1990). Studies that have found differences in satisfaction have also noted differences in other variables, suggesting that

job experiences might differ in at least some organizations. For example, Blacks had lower mean performance ratings than Whites in the Greenhaus et al. (1990) study. Perhaps the factors leading to lower ratings resulted in lowered job satisfaction. Somers and Birnbaum (2001) studied Black and White employees of a hospital and found that there were no differences between them after demographic variables (e.g., age and education) and type of work were controlled.

The alternative approach is to focus on

job facets or different aspects of the job, such as rewards (pay or fringe benefits), other people on the job (supervisors or coworkers), job conditions, and the nature of the work itself. A list of the most often studied facets appears in Table 9.1.

Job in General Scale (JIG) Ironson et al. (1989) developed a scale of global job satisfaction that contains items that do not reflect the various facets of the job. The Job in General Scale (JIG) was patterned on the JDI. It contains 18 items that are adjectives or short phrases about the

job in general. The scale has good reliability and correlates well with other scales of overall job satisfaction.

On the other hand, quasi-experimental field studies in which job characteristics were modified provide some support for at least a short-term effect of job characteristics on job satisfaction. Holman, Axtell, Sprigg, Totterdell, and Wall (2010) found that

job satisfaction improved for individuals whose jobs had core characteristics increased over a period of 9 months. Griffin (1991) conducted a similar quasi-experiment that also showed that increasing levels of core characteristics resulted in increased job satisfaction. However, job satisfaction returned to the level found before the change in jobs by the time of a 2-year follow-up. His results suggest that changes in job satisfaction may be short-lived and that once people get used to job changes, job satisfaction returns to a baseline level; in other words, the job satisfaction change is due to the novelty of the situation.

Similarly Huang and Van de Vliert (2003) found that power distance relates to

job satisfaction; people who are tolerant of large power distances are less satisfied with their jobs.

Commitment has been studied in relation to potential antecedent variables as well. Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, and Topolnytsky (2002) conducted a meta-analysis of 155 studies showing that commitment is associated with

job stress (people who perceive their jobs to be stressful have low commitment) and organizational justice (people who feel they have been unfairly treated have low commitment). However, relationships with these variables are stronger for affective commitment than either continuance or norma- tive commitment. Continuance commitment is most strongly related to how well skills can transfer from the current job to another job, which makes sense, since lack of trans- ferability would make it difficult for someone to switch jobs, thus producing a higher level of continuance commitment.

Note that for pay satisfaction, distributive justice has a

larger correlation than procedural justice. This suggests that the distribution of pay is more important for satisfaction than the procedures for distribution, although both are certainly important. For supervision satisfaction, procedural justice is more important than distributive justice, perhaps because it is the supervisor who decides on the procedures by which assignments and rewards are allocated.

People who deep act tend to

like their jobs, and people who surface act tend to dislike them. Similarly, H. A. M. Johnson and Spector (2007) found that deep acting and surface acting are related oppositely to the emotional exhaustion component of burnout (see Chapter 11 for a discussion of burnout).

Masculinity reflects the extent to which organizations focus on achievement and job performance as opposed to the health and well-being of employees. Scandinavian countries are

low on this value, which is reflected in their strong emphasis on health and well-being at work, while high countries include Japan and Austria. The United States is in the upper third.

Perhaps one reason for these cross-national differences has to do with culture values. As discussed earlier in the chapter, individualism-collectivism concerns whether people focus is on themselves (individualism) or on others (collectivism). Being members of collectivist societies, Indians and Mexicans might display

more loyalty to their employers and resist translating low commitment into turnover. Indeed, Cohen (2006) showed that collectivists in Israel have greater organizational commitment and are more likely to engage in behaviors to help their employers than are individualists

These dimensions have been found to relate to many organizational variables. In the job satisfaction area, Hui, Yee, and Eastman (1995) showed that individualism/collectivism scores for a country significantly related to satisfaction with social aspects of work. People from collectivist countries were

more satisfied with coworkers than were people from individualist countries. Similarly Huang and Van de Vliert (2003) found that power distance relates to job satisfaction; people who are tolerant of large power distances are less satisfied with their jobs.

Health and Well-Being I/O psychologists have been concerned that job dissatisfaction might be an important factor in employee health and well-being. Correlational studies show that job satisfaction relates to a variety of health-related variables. For example, dissatisfied employees report more physical symptoms, such as sleep problems and upset stomach, than their satisfied counterparts (Bowling & Hammond, 2008). Dissatisfaction has also been found to correlate with

negative emotions at work, such as anxiety and depression (Bowling & Hammond, 2008; Jex & Gudanowski, 1992). These negative emotional states could be considered indicators of psychological health or well-being at work. Evidence relating job satisfaction to more-serious health problems, such as heart disease, has been harder to produce (Heslop, Smith, Metcalfe, Macleod, & Hart, 2002).

Turnover in particular has been a focus of much commitment research (Somers, 2009). Because commitment refers to the attachment of people to jobs, we would expect it to be related to turnover. Those with low commitment should be more likely to quit their job than those with high commitment. Cooper-Hakim and Viswesvaran (2005) found that turnover (last row of the table) correlates

negatively with all three components, with continuance commitment relating most strongly. The pattern with turnover intentions is different in that continuance commitment has the weakest correlation of the three components. These results suggest that affective commitment relates most strongly to the desire to quit, as reflected in intentions, but it is the actual investments in the job, reflected in continuance commitment, that are most important in translating intentions to turnover itself.

Gender Most studies that have compared men and women in their global job satisfaction have found few differences. Meta-analytic studies involving multiple samples and thousands of employees have failed to find gender differences (Witt & Nye, 1992). Greenhaus, Parasuraman, and Wormley (1990) found...

no significant gender differences in their study, even though the distribution of jobs was not the same in their sample for both genders —males were more likely to have managerial/professional jobs, and females were more likely to have clerical jobs. This suggests that women may be happier with lower pay and less responsibility than men, perhaps because their expectations are lower about what they will receive or because they compare themselves to other women who are in similar circumstances.

All this leads to the hypothesis that if we compare the pay and pay satisfaction of people across different jobs, we will find little or no correlation. People who make more money are

not necessarily more satisfied when they have different jobs.

Many users of the scale have summed the facet results into an overall job satisfaction score. However, this practice is

not recommended by one of the scale's developers, Patricia Cain Smith (Ironson, Smith, Brannick, Gibson, & Paul, 1989).

People who are high in GNS will be satisfied with high-scope jobs and

not with low-scope jobs. The scope of the job is not important for people low in GNS. Their satisfaction stays constant, regardless of job scope.

Age The workforces in many countries have been getting older because of both the changing demographic makeup of the population (there are more elderly people) and legislation that has made age discrimination illegal. A question that has been of interest to I/O psychologists concerns possible changes in job satisfaction over a person's life span. Many studies (e.g., Siu, Lu, & Cooper, 1999) have shown that ......

older workers are more satisfied with their jobs than younger workers. Two large sample surveys, one conducted in England (Clark, Oswald, & Warr, 1996) and the other in nine countries including the United States (Birdi, Warr, & Oswald, 1995), found a curvilinear relation between age and job satisfaction. In these studies, job satisfaction at first declines with age, reaching the lowest level at around age 26 to 31, and then increases through the rest of the working career.

One limitation of most studies that have addressed the influence of job characteristics on job satisfaction is that the job characteristics were assessed with questionnaires given to the employees themselves. As discussed in Chapter 2, merely demonstrating that variables are correlated does not mean that

one necessarily causes the other. For example, people who like their jobs are likely to describe them in more favorable terms than people who dislike them, thereby reporting higher levels of job scope. Thus, job satisfaction might be the cause rather than the consequence of job characteristics as reported by employees on questionnaires. Although the Fried and Ferris (1987) results are consistent with the view that certain job characteristics can lead to job satisfaction, more evidence is needed to give confidence to this conclusion.

Job and Life Satisfaction Another important issue concerns the contribution of job satisfaction to overall life satisfaction —how satisfied a person is with his or her life circumstances. Life satisfaction is considered to be an indicator of

overall happiness or emotional well-being. Studies of life satisfaction have found that it correlates with job satisfaction (Bowling & Hammond, 2008).

-The segmentation hypothesis states that

people compartmentalize their lives and that satisfaction in one area of life has no relation to satisfaction in another.

This characteristic refers to a

person's desire for the satisfaction of higher-order needs, such as auton- omy and achievement. Meta-analyses of studies that have addressed the effects of GNS have shown that it moderates the relation between job characteristics and job satisfaction (Loher, Noe, Moeller, & Fitzgerald, 1985). Correlations between these two variables are greater for individuals who are high in GNS than for individuals who are low.

Findings such as these have led some researchers to take a

personality perspective. Their purpose has been to show that certain types of people are inclined to like or dislike their jobs. Still other researchers have taken the interactionist perspective of person-job fit, which combines the environmental and personality approaches. Person-job fit recognizes that different people prefer different features of a job. It attempts to learn which sorts of people are satisfied with which sorts of job conditions. Job satisfaction, according to this view, is the product of appropriately matching the individual to the job.

The experience of positive emotions by employees on the job can have

positive effects on employees and organizations, whereas the experience of negative emotions can have the opposite effects.

Surface acting, or pretending to be happy when experiencing the opposite emotion, leads to emotional dissonance, which is stressful and has been asso- ciated with negative effects (Zapf, 2002). On the other hand, deep acting, or making yourself feel positive emotions that are displayed to others, can have

positive effects on well-being. For example, Judge, Woolf, and Hurst (2009) showed that job satisfaction is oppositely related to deep and surface acting.

Even stronger evidence for personality than consistency across time was provided by Staw, Bell, and Clausen (1986) who studied people's job satisfaction over the span of decades (see the Research in Detail box). They found that personality assessed in adolescents

predicted job satisfaction up to 50 years later.

Dozens of studies across many different types of jobs have shown that each of the five characteristics relates to job satisfaction. Fried and Ferris (1987) conducted a meta- analysis of studies relating the Hackman and Oldham characteristics to global satisfaction. As discussed in Chapter 2, meta-analysis is a

quantitative procedure for combining results of different studies.

-The spillover hypothesis suggests that

satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) in one area of life affects or spills over to another. Thus problems and dissatisfaction at home can affect satisfaction with work, whereas problems and dissatisfaction at work can affect satisfaction with home.

Jacobs and Solomon (1977) conducted a study that supports the second explanation. They hypothesized that

satisfaction and performance are related more strongly when performance leads to rewards. The rationale is that employees who perform well will be more satisfied because they have received rewards. Jacobs and Solomon found support for their hypothesis that a performance-reward linkage leads to stronger satisfaction- performance relations.

There is evidence that performance may be the cause of

satisfaction. Job satisfaction has been linked to employee health-related variables, but we will need future research to tell us specifically how job attitudes might affect disease.

Internals have been found to be more

satisfied with their jobs than externals (Ng, Sorensen, & Eby, 2006; Q. Wang, Bowling, & Eschleman, 2010).

Combined these five core characteristics define the

scope or complexity and challenge of a job. It is assumed by job characteristics theory that high scope leads to job satisfaction and low scope leads to boredom and dissatisfaction.

Is Global Satisfaction the Sum of Facets? Researchers have debated whether global job satisfaction is the sum of facets or something different. Patricia Cain Smith, the developer of the JDI and JIG, has argued that they are

separate (Ironson et al., 1989). Many researchers, however, have treated the sum of facet scores as an indicator of overall job satisfaction. Each MSQ item reflects a specific facet, so that the total score is a sum of facets. This is justified by the fact that facets often correlate well with overall job satisfaction. For example, Ironson et al. (1989) found a .78 correlation of the JIG with the JDI Work scale. On the other hand, the summing of subscale scores presumes that all facets have been assessed and that each makes an equal contribution to global satisfaction. It seems unlikely that each facet has the same importance to every individual. Thus the sum of facets is an approximation of overall job satisfaction, but it may not exactly match the global satisfaction of individuals.

Environmental Antecedents of Job Satisfaction As we will discuss, there is research evidence showing that aspects of the job and job environment relate to job satisfaction. In other words,

some situations will produce satisfaction and others will produce dissatisfaction. In this section, we will look at characteristics of job tasks, pay, justice in the workplace, and the impact of stressful job conditions.

Although some of this pattern might be due to age, it is also likely that other factors are important as well. One factor is tenure on the job. It has been shown that job satisfaction is high at the time of hiring and then declines after an initial honeymoon period (Boswell, Shipp, Payne, & Culbertson, 2009). Age is confounded with

tenure on the job (only older workers can have long years of service), and so part of the relationship with age might be due to tenure. Very young workers will be new to a job, and thus their job satisfaction is high. As employees get older, their average tenure increases, and so many of them will be past the honeymoon period and experience lowered job satisfaction. Over time, however, job satisfaction will increase, perhaps as employees adjust to working life.

Negative affectivity (NA) is the tendency for an individual to experience negative emotions, such as anxiety or depression, across a wide variety of situations. Watson, Pennebaker, and Folger (1986) extended the NA idea to the workplace, hypothesizing that high NA individuals would likely be dissatisfied because they tend to view all aspects of their world in a negative way. This is consistent with the idea of

the chronic kicker, mentioned earlier, in that some people just dwell on negative aspects of life. This theoretical idea is supported by Connolly and Viswesvaran (2000), who conducted a meta- analysis of 27 studies that found a mean correlation between NA and job satisfaction of −.27, showing that individuals who are high on NA tend to score low on job satisfaction.

One reason that it has been possible to demonstrate such a linkage between job satisfaction and turnover has to do with

the designs of turnover studies and the nature of turnover. Most turnover studies are predictive, assessing job satisfaction in a sample of employees on one occasion and then waiting some period of months or years to see who quits. The predictive nature of these studies allows the conclusion that dissatisfaction is a factor that leads employees to quit their jobs.

-Furthermore, the negative effects of emotional labor are reduced when

the employee has high levels of autonomy and control (Grandey, Fisk, & Steiner, 2005; H. A. M. Johnson & Spector, 2007). Having control over the situation, such as being given latitude in how to deal with a rude customer, will tend to reduce negative effects, presumably because the employee does not have to fake being happy while being treated rudely by a customer.

Organizational commitment is another attitudinal variable that has been popular among I/O researchers. Commitment concerns

the employee's attachment to the organization. It correlates strongly with job satisfaction, but it is conceptually different.

THE NATURE OF JOB SATISFACTION Job satisfaction is an attitudinal variable that reflects how people feel about their jobs overall, as well as various aspects of the jobs. In simple terms, job satisfaction is

the extent to which people like their jobs; job dissatisfaction is the extent to which they dislike them.

Justice As noted in the Chapter 8 discussion of justice theories, perceptions of fairness are important determinants of people's behavior and reactions to work. Distributive justice is

the extent to which people perceive the allotment of rewards at work to be fair, whereas procedural justice is the extent to which people perceive the process by which rewards at work are allocated to be fair. These two forms of justice have been linked to both global and facet job satisfaction in the Cohen-Charash and Spector (2001) meta-analysis. Overall job satisfaction and facet satisfactions of pay, supervision, and nature of work correlate significantly with both forms of justice (see Table 9.7).

Pay Although pay itself is associated to some extent with global satisfaction, as might be expected it relates even more strongly with the facet of pay satisfaction. Brasher and Chen (1999) surveyed recent college graduates and found that their level of starting pay relates more strongly to pay satisfaction (correlation = .36) than to global satisfaction (correlation = .17). Furthermore, it is

the fairness with which pay is distributed, or equity (see Chapter 8 for a discussion of justice theories), that is a more important determinant of pay satisfaction than the actual level of pay itself (Williams, McDaniel, & Nguyen, 2006). You can find people making minimum wage who are satisfied with pay, whereas professional athletes and entertainers might be dissatisfied with six- and even seven-figure salaries.

ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT Organizational commitment is another popular attitudinal variable in the work domain. It is strongly related to job satisfaction, but it is distinctly different in focusing on the attachment of the individual to the organization rather than on whether an individ- ual likes or dislikes the job. The study of organizational commitment has taken two perspectives—

the global and the component.

There have been two approaches to the study of job satisfaction—

the global approach and the facet approach. The global approach treats job satisfaction as a single, overall feeling toward the job. Many studies assess people's overall satisfaction, and many of the findings discussed in this chapter reflect that variable. The alternative approach is to focus on job facets or different aspects of the job, such as rewards (pay or fringe benefits), other people on the job (supervisors or coworkers), job conditions, and the nature of the work itself. A list of the most often studied facets appears in Table 9.1.

Although the research on these personality traits has shown a connection with job satisfaction, the reasons are not well delineated. Watson et al. (1986) suggested that NA relates to job satisfaction because

the high NA person perceives and experiences the job negatively, regardless of the actual conditions.

Unfortunately studies that have used different methodologies have not always been supportive of

the idea that these five job characteristics lead to job satisfaction. For example, Spector and Jex (1991) used both questionnaires and job analysis techniques to assess job characteristics in a sample of employees who represented a wide range of jobs. Whereas the questionnaire measure of job characteristics correlated with job satisfaction, the job analysis data did not.

Another approach to studying the interplay of the job and person is to look at

the interaction of specific person and job variables in predicting job satisfaction. That is, person variables are used as moderators of the relation between job variables and job satisfaction.

Personality The idea that job satisfaction may be caused in part by personality can be traced back to the Hawthorne studies. The Hawthorne researchers noticed that certain individuals, whom they called the chronic kickers, were continually complaining about the job (Roethlis- berger, 1941). No matter what the researchers did for them, the chronic kickers always had new complaints. More recently Bowling, Beehr, and Lepisto (2006) explored the stability of satisfaction by studying people who changed employers. They found that

the job satisfaction of these individuals was correlated across a 5-year span of time. In other words, the job satisfaction of people on one job correlated with their satisfaction on another.

At least part of the reason for the relatively small mean correlations found in these meta-analyses may have to do with

the measures of job performance available in many studies. Most studies rely on supervisor ratings of performance, which suffer from several limitations, as discussed in Chapter 4. Supervisors frequently exhibit rating errors, especially when ratings are for organizational purposes. This can produce inaccuracy in performance ratings, which introduces extra error into the statistics. Relations of satisfaction with performance would likely be stronger if more accurate measures of performance were used.

One of the major tasks I/O psychologists perform is assessing employee attitudes about their jobs, especially their job satisfaction, and determining ways to improve it. I/O researchers have extensively studied the causes and consequences of job satisfaction since the beginning of the I/O field itself. It is one of the two most studied variables in I/O psychology (the other one is job performance). Much of this popularity, as we will see, derives from

the relative ease with which it can be assessed. Another reason for the popularity of the study of job satisfaction is that it is a central variable in many theories that deal with organizational phenomena, such as the nature of work, supervision, and the job environment. Job satisfaction has been posited as a cause of important employee and organizational outcomes ranging from job performance to health and longevity.

As with job satisfaction, there have been few gender or racial differences found with organizational commitment. For example, Ng, Butts, Vandenberg, DeJoy, and Wilson (2006) found that men and women, and Whites and non-Whites, have ....

the same level of organizational commitment.

Person-Job Fit Most researchers have tended to treat environmental and personal factors as independent influences on job satisfaction. In other words, they have studied characteristics of jobs or of individuals that may lead to satisfaction. Another approach, however, is to look at the interaction of both factors. The person-job fit approach states that job satisfaction will occur when

there is a good match between the person and the job.

Job Satisfaction and Job Performance The idea that job satisfaction and job performance are related seems intuitively obvious. After all, shouldn't satisfied employees be productive employees? Judge, Thoresen, Bono, and Patton (2001) conducted a thorough meta-analysis of 312 studies and found that

there is a modest relationship—the average correlation is .20 between job performance and global satisfaction. Two other investigators, Iaffaldano and Muchinsky (1985), found that the correlation with individual facets, however, is variable, ranging from .05 for pay satisfaction to .20 for satisfaction with intrinsic aspects of the job.

THE ASSESSMENT OF JOB SATISFACTION Job satisfaction is almost always assessed by asking people how they feel about their jobs, either by questionnaire or by interview. Most of the time questionnaires are used because

they are very easy to administer and require relatively little time and effort on the part of the researcher. They can also be done anonymously, which allows employees to be more candid in expressing their attitudes. Sometimes, more often in practice than in research, employees are interviewed about their satisfaction. A few cases can be found in which job satisfaction was assessed by asking supervisors (Spector, Dwyer, & Jex, 1988) or observers (Glick, Jenkins, & Gupta, 1986) to estimate another person's satisfaction, but such estimates are not likely to be completely accurate, since only the individual employees really know their own attitudes.

Bowling et al. concluded that job satisfaction is caused in part by

underlying personality. Some people are predisposed to like their jobs, whereas others are predisposed not to like them. T. Newton and Keenan (1991) did a similar study, but found evidence that job environment, as well as personality, is important. They studied a group of British engineers during their first 4 years on the job after college. They also found consistency in job satisfaction over time, but in addition they found that engineers who changed jobs increased their satisfaction. Dormann and Zapf (2001) conducted a meta-analysis of such studies showing that job satisfaction is far more stable over time when people remain on the same job (mean correlation = .42) than when they change jobs (mean correlation = .18). Thus, although personality may contribute to satisfaction, job conditions are also important.

Cultural and Ethnic Differences Another trend in the composition of the workforce in the United States and other countries is that it is becoming increasingly multicultural. In addition, large organizations frequently have facilities in multiple countries and employ people from those countries. For example, American automobile manufacturers have plants outside the United States, and Japanese automobile manufacturers such as Toyota have plants in the United States. If organizations are to deal appropriately with a diverse workforce, then they must

understand how people of various ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds view and feel about their jobs.

Although the relation between employees' reports of their job characteristics and job satisfaction is consistent across samples in the United States and other Western countries, it might not be universal. Pearson and Chong (1997) were unable to find the same results in Malaysia (see the International Research box). The five core characteristics were

unrelated to job satisfaction in a sample of nurses. The researchers argued that in this collectivistic Asian culture, it might be more important to focus on relationships among coworkers and supervisors as a means of achieving high job satisfaction than on the nature of job tasks. However, a study conducted in more developed and Westernized Hong Kong found relations between job characteristics and job satisfaction quite similar to those found in the United States (Wong, Hui, & Law, 1998). Clearly we need to be careful about generalizing results from one country to another and not assume that what works here will work everywhere.

There are many ways that people and jobs fit, however, including the correspondence between task demands and personal abilities (Greguras & Diefendorff, 2009). Much of the research on person-job fit has looked at the correspondence between

what people say they want on a job and what they say they have (e.g., L.-Q. Yang, Che, & Spector, 2008). For example, employees could be asked how much autonomy they have and how much they want. The difference between having and wanting represents the amount of fit of person to job. Studies have been quite consistent in showing that the smaller the discrepancy between having and wanting, the greater the job satisfaction. For example, Verquer, Beehr, and Wagner (2003) conducted a meta-analysis of 21 person-job fit studies and found that various measures of fit were correlated with job satisfaction.

Locus of control refers to

whether or not people believe they are in control of reinforcements in life. People who believe that they control reinforcements are termed internals. People who believe that fate, luck, or powerful others control reinforcements are termed externals. Internals have been found to be more satisfied with their jobs than externals (Ng, Sorensen, & Eby, 2006; Q. Wang, Bowling, & Eschleman, 2010).