Industrial/ Organizational Psychology
Chapter 10: Employee Satisfaction and Commitment
Reviewer
Aamondt
Job satisfaction
 The attitude an employee has toward her job
Organizational commitment
 The extent to which an employee identifies with
and is involved with an organization.
Three motivational facets to organizational
commitment:
 Affective commitment
o the extent to which an employee wants
to remain with the organization, cares
about the organization, and is willing to
exert effort on its behalf
 Continuance commitment
o the extent to which an employee
believes she must remain with the
organization due to the time, expense,
and effort that she has already put into
it or the difficulty she would have in
finding another job.
 Normative commitment
o the extent to which an employee feels
obligated to the organization and, as a
result of this obligation, must remain
with the organization
Individual difference theory
 postulates that some variability in job
satisfaction is due to an individual’s personal
tendency across situations to enjoy what she
does.
Genetic Predispositions
 It suggests that job satisfaction not only
may be fairly stable across jobs but also
may be genetically determined.
Core Self-Evaluations
 It is when certain types of personalities are
associated with the tendency to be satisfied
or dissatisfied with one’s job
o emotional stability
o self-esteem
o self-efficacy
 perceived ability to master
their environment
o external locus of control
 perceived ability to control
their environment
Culture
 Workers in different countries have
different levels of job satisfaction
Intelligence
 Ganzach (1998) suggests that bright people
have slightly lower job satisfaction than do
less intelligent employees in jobs that are
not complex
Employee Satisfaction with Other Aspects of Their Life
- job satisfaction is consistent not only across
time but that the extent to which a person is
satisfied with all aspects of life
- people who are satisfied with their jobs tend to
be satisfied with life
Discrepancy theory
 If there is a discrepancy between these needs,
values, and expectations and the reality of the
job, employees will become dissatisfied and less
motivated
Is the employee “fit” for the job?
 When employees consider how well they “fit”
with a job or an organization, they consider the
extent to which their:
o Values
o Interests
o Personality
o Lifestyle
o Skills
 match those of their
o vocation (e.g., a career such as nursing,
law enforcement, or psychology)
o job (its particular tasks)
o organization
o co-workers
o supervisor
 Employees who perceive a good fit with their
organization, job, co-workers, and supervisor
tend to be satisfied with their jobs, identify with
the organization, remain with the organization,
perform better, and engage in organizational
citizenship behaviours
 the extent to which employees’ desire for a
particular work schedule (e.g., shift, number of
hours) matches their actual schedule
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Social information processing theory a.k.a Social
Learning Theory
 postulates that employees observe the levels of
motivation and satisfaction of other employees
and then model those levels
 The study on this supports the idea that the
social environment does have an effect on
employees’ attitudes and behaviours
 social pressures force individuals to behave in
ways that are consistent with the norm, even
though the person may privately believe
something different
Rewards and Resources
 One factor related to both job satisfaction and
employee motivation is the extent to which
employees perceive that they are being treated
fairly. Equity Theory
Distributive justice
 The perceived fairness of the actual
decisions made in an organization
Procedural justice
 It is the perceived fairness of the
methods used to arrive at the decision
Interactional justice
 It is the perceived fairness of the
interpersonal treatment employees
receive
Reasons why Equity Theory is difficult to
implement
1. Practicality
2. Perception of inputs and outputs
determines equity
Employees Chance for Growth and Challenge
 To help satisfy employee self-actualization
needs, organizations can do many things.
 The easiest and most common are job rotation,
job enlargement, and job enrichment
 With job rotation and job enlargement,
an employee learns how to use several
different machines or conduct several
different tasks within an organization
 With job rotation, the employee is
given the same number of tasks to do at
one time, but the tasks change from
time to time
 With job enlargement, an employee is
given more tasks to do at one time
Job enrichment
 the employee assumes more responsibility over
the tasks
 enriched jobs are the most satisfying
 Enriched jobs allow a variety of skills to be used,
allow employees
o to complete an entire task rather than
parts of a task
o involve tasks that have meaning or
importance
o allow employees to make decisions
o provide feedback about performance
 Job Diagnostic Survey (JDS) – measures the
extent to which these characteristics are
present in a given job
Self-directed teams or Quality circles
 Employees meet as a group to discuss and make
recommendations about work issues.
Integration of Theories
 people will be most satisfied with a job if they
had the option to choose that job from other
alternatives rather than the job being their only
choice
 Once people are employed at a job, however,
they are most satisfied when they don’t have
other career alternatives
Measuring Job Satisfaction and Commitment
Commonly Used Standard Inventories
Measures of Job Satisfaction
 Faces Scale (Kunin, 1955)
o Easy to use but not commonly used
nowadays
 Job Descriptive Index (JDI) (Smith, Kendall,
and Hulin, 1969)
o Commonly used nowadays
o consists of a series of job-related
adjectives and statements that are
rated by employee
o yield scores on five dimensions of
job satisfaction: supervision, pay,
promotional opportunities,
coworkers, and the work itself
 Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire
(MSQ) (Weiss, Dawis, England, and Lofquist,
1967)
o contains 100 items that yield scores
on 20 scales
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  Job in General (JIG) Scale (Ironson, Smith,
Brannick, Gibson, and Paul, 1989)
o It useful when an organization
wants to measure the overall level
of job satisfaction rather than
specific aspects
Measures of Commitment
 Most measures are relatively short and tap
aspects similar to the three types of
commitment mentioned previously:
affective commitment, continuance
commitment, and normative commitment
 Organizational Commitment Questionnaire
(OCQ) (Mowday, Steers, and Porter, 1979)
o A 15-item questionnaire to measure
three commitment factors:
 acceptance of the
organization’s values and
goals
 willingness to work to help
the organization
 a desire to remain with the
organization
 Organizational Commitment Scale (OCS)
(Balfour and Wechsler, 1996)
o A nine-item survey that measures
three aspects of commitment:
 Identification
 Exchange
 affiliation
Custom-Designed Inventories
 The advantage to custom-designed
inventories is that an organization can
ask employees questions specific to
their organization
Consequences of Dissatisfaction and Other Negative
Work Attitudes
Absenteeism
 when employees are dissatisfied or not
committed to the organization, they are
more likely to miss work and leave their
jobs
 Because of the high costs of
absenteeism and turnover,
organizations are expending great effort
to reduce the number of unscheduled
absences
Linking Attendance to Consequences
 includes weighing the consequences of
going to work (or to class) against the
consequences of not going
 employees make conscious decisions
about attending work, attendance can
be increased in several ways
o rewarding attendance
o disciplining absenteeism
o keeping accurate attendance
records
Rewards for Attending
 Financial Incentives
 Paid time off program (PTO)
 Recognition Programs
Discipline for Not Attending
 It can range from giving a warning or a
less popular work assignment to firing
an employee.
Clear Policies and Better Record Keeping
 Absenteeism can be decreased by
setting attendance goals and by
providing feedback on how well the
employees are reaching those goals.
Increasing Attendance by Reducing Employee
Stress
 Absenteeism can be reduced by
removing the negative factors
employees associate with going to work
Increasing Attendance by Reducing Illness
 Implementing of a variety of wellness
programs to reduce absenteeism due to
illness
Reducing Absenteeism by Not Hiring “Absence-
Prone” Employees
 certain types of people are more likely
to miss work than other types
Uncontrollable Absenteeism Caused by Unique
Events
 Many times an individual will miss work
because of events or conditions that are
beyond management’s control
Turnover
Cost of Turnover
 It is a problem because the cost of
losing an employee is estimated at 1.5
times the employee’s salary
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 Reducing Turnover
 The first step in reducing turnover is to
find out why your employees are
leaving
 Employees typically leave their jobs for
one of five reasons: unavoidable
reasons, advancement, unmet needs,
escape, and unmet expectations

Counterproductive Behaviors
 Two types of Counterproductive behaviors:
o those aimed at individuals
o those aimed at the organization

Lack of Organizational Citizenship Behaviors

 Employees who engage in organizational
citizenship behaviors (OCBs) are motivated to
help the organization and their coworkers by
doing the “little things” that they are not
required to do
 employees who are satisfied with their jobs and
committed to the organization are more likely
to “go the extra mile” than are employees who
are dissatisfied with their jobs