Las Actitudes En El Contexto Laboral

Question 1

attitudes

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

attitudes and behavior

Answer 2

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.3Did 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.6No 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

Question 3

job attitudes: We have thousands of attitudes, but OB focuses on a very limited number that form positive or negative evaluations employees hold about their work environ-ments.

Answer 3

• Job Satisfaction and Job Involvement: When people speak of employee attitudes, they usually mean job satisfaction, a positive feeling about a job resulting from an evaluation of its character-istics. A person with high job satisfaction holds positive feelings about the work, while a person with low satisfaction holds negative feelings. Because OB researchers give job satisfaction high importance, we’ll review this attitude in detail later.Related to job satisfaction is job involvement, the degree to which people identify psychologically with their jobs and consider their perceived perfor-mance levels important to their self-worth.9 Employees with high job involve-ment strongly identify with and really care about the kind of work they do. Another closely related concept is psychological empowerment, or employ-ees’ beliefs in: the degree to which they influence their work environment, their competencies, the meaningfulness of their job, and their perceived autonomy.10 Research suggests that empowerment initiatives need to be tailored to desired behavioral outcomes. Research in Singapore found that good leaders empower their employees by fostering their self-perception of competence—through involving them in decisions, making them feel their work is important, and giving them discretion to “do their own thing
• Organizational Commitment: An employee with organizational commitment identifies with a particular orga-nization and its goals and wishes to remain a member. Emotional attachment to an organization and belief in its values is the “gold standard” for employee commitment.12Employees who are committed will be less likely to engage in work with-drawal even if they are dissatisfied because they have a sense of organizational loyalty or attachment.13 Even if employees are not currently happy with their work, they are willing to make sacrifices for the organization if they are commit-ted enough
• Perceived Organizational SupportPerceived organizational support (POS) is the degree to which employees believe the organization values their contributions and cares about their well- being. An excellent example is R&D engineer John Greene, whose POS is sky-high because when he was diagnosed with leukemia, CEO Marc Benioff and 350 fellow Salesforce.com employees covered all his medical expenses and stayed in touch with him throughout his recovery. No doubt stories like this are part of the reason Salesforce.com was number 8 of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2015.14People perceive their organizations as supportive when rewards are deemed fair, when employees have a voice in decisions, and when they see their supervisors as supportive.15 POS is a predictor, but there are some cul-tural influences. POS is important in countries where the power distance, the degree to which people in a country accept that power in institutions and organizations is distributed unequally, is lower. In low power-distance coun-tries like the United States, people are more likely to view work as an exchange than as a moral obligation, so employees look for reasons to feel supported by their organizations. In high power-distance countries like China, employee POS perceptions are not as deeply based on demonstrations of fairness, sup-port, and encouragement
• Employee Engagement: Employee engagement is an individual’s involvement with, satisfaction with, and enthusiasm for the work he or she does. To evaluate engagement, we might ask employees whether they have access to resources and opportunities to learn new skills, whether they feel their work is important and meaning-ful, and whether interactions with coworkers and supervisors are rewarding.16 Highly engaged employees have a passion for their work and feel a deep con-nection to their companies; disengaged employees have essentially checked out, putting time but not energy or attention into their work. 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.Engagement levels determine many measurable outcomes. A study of nearly 8,000 business units in 36 companies found that units whose employees reported high-average levels of engagement achieved higher levels of customer satisfaction, were more productive, brought in higher profits, and experienced lower levels of turnover and accidents than at other business units.17 Molson Coors, for example, found engaged employees were five times less likely to have safety incidents, and when an accident did occur it was much less serious and less costly for the engaged employee than for a disengaged one ($63 per of satisfaction with the job is thus a complex summation of many discrete ele-ments. How, then, do we measure it?Two approaches are popular. 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.” The second method, the summation of job facets, is more sophisticated. It identifies key elements in a job such as the type of work, skills needed, supervision, present pay, promotion opportuni-ties, culture, and relationships with coworkers. Respondents rate these on a standardized scale, and researchers add the ratings to create an overall job satisfaction score.Is one of these approaches superior? Intuitively, summing up responses to a number of job factors seems likely to achieve a more accurate evaluation of job satisfaction. Research, however, doesn’t support the intuition.23 This is one of those rare instances in which simplicity seems to work as well as complexity, making one method essentially as valid as the other. Both methods can be help-ful. The single global rating method isn’t very time consuming, while the sum-mation of job facets helps managers zero in on problems and deal with them faster and more accurately.

Question 4

What Causes Job Satisfaction?

Answer 4

• Job Conditions: Generally, interesting jobs that provide training, variety, independence, and control satisfy most employees. Interdependence, feedback, social support, and interaction with coworkers outside the workplace are also strongly related to job satisfaction, even after accounting for characteristics of the work itself.29 As you may have guessed, managers also play a big role in employees’ job satisfaction. Employees who feel empowered by their leaders experience higher job satisfac-tion, one study of a large Hong Kong telecommunications corporation found.30 Research in Israel suggested that a manager’s attentiveness, responsiveness, and support increase the employee’s job satisfaction.
• Personality: As important as job conditions are to job satisfaction, personality also plays an important role. People who have positive core self-evaluations (CSEs)—who be-lieve in their inner worth and basic competence—are more satisfied with their jobs than people with negative CSEs. Additionally, in the context of career com-mitment, CSE influences job satisfaction as people with high levels of both CSE and career commitment may realize particularly high job satisfaction
• Pay: You’ve probably noticed that pay comes up often when people discuss job satisfaction. Pay does correlate with job satisfaction and overall happiness for many people, but the effect can be smaller once an individual reaches a standard level of comfortable living. Take a look at Exhibit 3-5. It shows the relationship between the average pay for a job and the average level of job sat-isfaction. As you can see, there isn’t much of a relationship there. Money does Attitudes and Job Satisfaction CHAPTER 3 123motivate people, as we will discover in Chapter 6. But what motivates us is not necessarily the same as what makes us happy
• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)Would you be as happy to work for an organization with a stated social wel-fare mission as one without? An organization’s commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR), or its self-regulated actions to benefit society or the en-vironment beyond what is required by law, increasingly affects employee job satisfaction. Organizations practice CSR in a number of ways, including envi-ronmental sustainability initiatives, nonprofit work, and charitable giving.CSR is good for the planet and good for people. Employees whose personal values fit with the organization’s CSR mission are often more satisfied. In fact, of 59 large and small organizations recently surveyed, 86 percent reported they have happier employees as a result of their CSR programs.34The relationship between CSR and job satisfaction is particularly strong for Millennials. “The next generation of employees is seeking out employers that are focused on the triple bottom line: people, planet, and revenue,” said Susan Cooney, founder of philanthropy firm Givelocity.35 CSR allows workers to serve a higher purpose or contribute to a mission. According to researcher Amy Wrzesniewski, people who view their work as part of a higher purpose often realize higher job satisfaction.36 However, an organization’s CSR efforts must be well governed and its initiatives must be sustainable for long-term job satisfac-tion benefits.37Although the link between CSR and job satisfaction is strengthening, not all employees find value in CSR.38 Therefore, organizations need to address a few issues in order to be most effective. First, not all projects are equally mean-ingful for every person’s job satisfaction, yet participation for all employees is sometimes expected. For instance, Lisa Dewey, a partner at one of the world’s largest law firms, said, “All DLA Piper attorneys and staff are encouraged to par-ticipate in the firm’s pro bono and volunteer projects.”39 Requiring these activi-ties may decrease overall job satisfaction for those who do not wish to volunteer their time but are required to do so.Second, some organizations require employees to contribute in a prescribed manner. For instance, consulting firm entreQuest’s CEO, Joe Mechlinksi, requires employees to participate in “Give Back Days” by serving in a soup kitchen, building a Habitat for Humanity house, or mentoring children. These choices may not fit every individual’s vision of CSR. Furthermore, pressuring people to go “above and beyond” in ways that are not natural for them can burn them out for future CSR projects40 and lower their job satisfaction, particularly when CSR projects provide direct benefits to the organization (such as positive press coverage).41 People want CSR to be genuine and authentic.Third, CSR measures can seem disconnected from the employee’s actual work,42 providing no increase to job satisfaction. After watching consulting firm KPMG’s “over the top” video that boasted of involvement in the election of Nelson Mandela and the end of Apartheid, the launch of the first space station by NASA, and the freedom of U.S. hostages in Iran, one anonymous employee questioned his employment. “If I want to really make a change,” he said, “why would I sit here?”43In sum, CSR is a needed, positive trend of accountability and serving. It can also significantly contribute to increased employee job satisfaction when managed well

Question 5

Outcomes of Job Satisfaction

Answer 5

• Job Performance: As several studies have concluded, happy workers are more likely to be produc-tive workers. Some researchers used to believe the relationship between job sat-isfaction and job performance was a myth, but a review of 300 studies suggested the correlation is quite robust.44 Individuals with higher job satisfaction per-form better, and organizations with more satisfied employees tend to be more effective than those with fewer.
• Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB): It seems logical that job satisfaction should be a major determinant of an em-ployee’s organizational citizenship behavior (known as OCB or citizenship be-havior, see Chapter 1).45 OCBs include people talking positively about their organizations, helping others, and going beyond the normal expectations of their jobs. Evidence suggests job satisfaction is moderately correlated with OCB; people who are more satisfied with their jobs are more likely to engage in citi-zenship behavior.46Why does job satisfaction lead to OCB? One reason is trust. Research in 18 countries suggests that managers reciprocate employees’ OCB with trusting behaviors of their own.47 Individuals who feel their coworkers support them are also more likely to engage in helpful behaviors than those who have antagonistic coworker relationships.48 Personality matters, too. Individuals with certain per-sonality traits (agreeableness and conscientiousness, see Chapter 5) are more satisfied with their work, which in turn leads them to engage in more OCB.49 Finally, individuals who receive positive feedback on their OCB from their peers are more likely to continue their citizenship activities.
• Customer Satisfaction: Because service organization managers should be concerned with pleasing cus-tomers, it’s reasonable to ask whether employee satisfaction is related to posi-tive customer outcomes. For frontline employees who have regular customer contact, the answer is “yes.” Satisfied employees appear to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.51A number of companies are acting on this evidence. Online shoe retailer Zappos is so committed to finding customer service employees who are satisfied with the job that it offers a $2,000 bribe to quit the company after training, figur-ing the least satisfied will take the cash and go.52 Zappos employees are empow-ered to “create fun and a little weirdness” to ensure that customers are satisfied, and it works: of the company’s more than 24 million customers, 75 percent are repeat buyers. Therefore, for Zappos, employee satisfaction has a direct effect on customer satisfaction
• Life Satisfaction: Until now, we’ve treated job satisfaction as if it were separate from life satisfac-tion, but they may be more related than you think.53 Research in Europe indi-cated that job satisfaction is positively correlated with life satisfaction, and your attitudes and experiences in life spill over into your job approaches and experi-ences.54 Furthermore, life satisfaction decreases when people become unem-ployed, according to research in Germany, and not just because of the loss of income.55 For most individuals, work is an important part of life, and therefore it makes sense that our overall happiness depends in no small part on our hap-piness in our work (our job satisfaction).

Question 6

The Impact of Job Dissatisfaction: four responses to job dissatisfaction, which differ along two dimensions: constructive/destructive and active/passive

Answer 6

• Exit. The exit response directs behavior toward leaving the organization, including looking for a new position or resigning. To measure the effects of this response to dissatisfaction, researchers study individual termina-tions and collective turnover, the total loss to the organization of employee knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristic
• Voice. The voice response includes actively and constructively attempting to improve conditions, including suggesting improvements, discussing problems with superiors, and undertaking union activity.
• Loyalty. The loyalty response means 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 manage-ment to “do the right thing
• Neglect. The neglect response passively allows conditions to worsen and includes chronic absenteeism or lateness, reduced effort, and an increased error rate

Exit and neglect behaviors are linked to performance variables such as productivity, absenteeism, and turnover. But this model expands employee responses to include voice and loyalty—constructive behaviors that allow indi-viduals to tolerate unpleasant situations or improve working conditions.The model helps us understand various situations. For instance, union mem-bers often express dissatisfaction through the grievance procedure or formal contract negotiations. These voice mechanisms allow them to continue in their jobs while acting to improve the situation.As helpful as this framework is, it’s quite general. We will next address coun-terproductive work behavior, a behavioral response to job dissatisfaction.

Question 7

Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB)

Answer 7

Substance abuse, stealing at work, undue socializing, gossiping, absenteeism, and tardiness are examples of behaviors that are destructive to organizations. They are indicators of a broader syndrome called counterproductive work behavior (CWB), also termed deviant behavior in the workplace, or simply em-ployee withdrawal (see Chapter 1).58 Like other behaviors we have discussed, CWB doesn’t just happen—the behaviors often follow negative and sometimes longstanding attitudes. Therefore, if we can identify the predictors of CWB, we may lessen the probability of its effects.Generally, job dissatisfaction predicts CWB. People who are not satisfied with their work become frustrated, which lowers their performance59 and makes them more likely to commit CWB.60 Other research suggests that, in addition to vocational misfit (being in the wrong line of work), lack of fit with he organization (working in the wrong kind of organizational culture) also predicts CWBs.61 Our immediate social environment also matters. One German study suggests that we are influenced toward CWB by the norms of our immedi-ate work environment, such that individuals in teams with high absenteeism are more likely to be absent themselves.62 CWB can, furthermore, be a response to abusive supervision from managers, which then increases the abuse, starting a vicious cycle.63One important point about CWB is that dissatisfied employees often choose one or more of these specific behaviors due to idiosyncratic factors. One worker might quit. Another might use work time to surf the Internet or take work supplies home for personal use. In short, workers who don’t like their jobs “get even” in various ways. Because those ways can be quite creative, con-trolling only one behavior with policies and punishments leaves the root cause untouched. Employers should seek to correct the source of the problem—the dissatisfaction—rather than try to control the different responses

• Absenteeism : We find a consistent negative relationship between satisfac-tion and absenteeism, but the relationship is moderate to weak.68 Generally, when numerous alternative jobs are available, dissatisfied employees have high absence rates, but when there are few alternatives, dissatisfied employees have the same (low) rate of absence as satisfied employees.69 Organizations that provide liberal sick leave benefits are encouraging all their employees— including those who are highly satisfied—to take days off. You can find work satisfying yet still want to enjoy a 3-day weekend if those days come free with no penalties
• Turnover The relationship between job satisfaction and turnover is stronger than between satisfaction and absenteeism.70 Overall, a pattern of lowered job satisfaction is the best predictor of intent to leave. Turnover has a workplace en-vironment connection too. If the climate within an employee’s immediate work-place is one of low job satisfaction leading to turnover, there will be a contagion effect. This suggests managers consider the job satisfaction (and turnover) pat-terns of coworkers when assigning workers to a new area.71The satisfaction–turnover relationship is affected by alternative job pros-pects. If an employee accepts an unsolicited job offer, job dissatisfaction was less predictive of turnover because the employee more likely left in response to “pull” (the lure of the other job) than “push” (the unattractiveness of the current job). Similarly, job dissatisfaction is more likely to translate into turn-over when other employment opportunities are plentiful. Furthermore, when employees have high “human capital” (high education, high ability), job dissat-isfaction is more likely to translate into turnover because they have, or perceive, many available alternatives.72There are some factors that help break the dissatisfaction–turnover relation-ship. Employees’ embeddedness—connections to the job and community—can help lower the probability of turnover, particularly in collectivist (group-oriented) cultures.73 Embedded employees seem less likely to want to consider alternative job prospects.