Essentials of Job Attitudes and Other Workplace Psychological Constructs

Valerie I. Sessa, Nathan A. Bowling, Valerie I. Sessa, Nathan A. Bowling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000282856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Organizational Behavior

Although the topic of job attitudes and other workplace psychological constructs such as perceptions, identity, bonds, and motivational states is important, there are no books addressing the topic as a whole. Essentials of Job Attitudes and Other Workplace Psychological Constructs seeks to fill that void in a comprehensive edited volume that compiles chapters by experts on each construct.

Essentials of Job Attitudes and Other Workplace Psychological Constructs begins with a review of the concept of job attitudes and other workplace psychological constructs, then devotes a single chapter to each construct. These chapters focus on organizational justice, perceived organizational support, organizational identification, job involvement, workplace commitments, job embeddedness, job satisfaction, employee engagement, and team-related work attitudes. Each of these chapters addresses parallel content including definitions, history, theory, a critique of the field to date with future research recommendations, and how the given construct can be used in practice. There are two additional features that make this book unique: first, each chapter provides a nomological network figure of the workplace psychological construct addressed; and second, each chapter provides one or more of the current measures used to assess the construct of interest.

Essentials of Job Attitudes and Other Workplace Psychological Constructs is an ideal text for students and professionals in industrial-organizational psychology, organizational behavior, and human resource management.

Part I

Why Study Job Attitudes and Other Workplace Psychological Constructs

1

Essentials of Job Attitudes and Other Workplace Psychological Constructs

An Introductory Chapter

Nathan A. Bowling and Valerie I. Sessa

This book takes on the audacious task of reviewing the literature on one of the core content areas within the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s (SIOP, 2016) Guidelines for Education and Training in Industrial-Organizational Psychology: Attitude Theory, Measurement, and Change (see Competency 7 from the Guidelines):

Attitudes, opinions, and beliefs are important for quality of work life, for diagnosing problems in organizations, and in regards to their relation to behavioral intentions and behaviors at work. Some of the job attitudes typically studied by I-O psychologists include, but are not limited to, engagement, job satisfaction (general and facets), job involvement, organizational commitment, and perceptions of support and fairness.

I-O psychologists should also be aware of the extensive literature on attitude theory, measurement, and change. In particular, I-O psychologists must know how attitudes are formed and changed and how they relate to behaviors. With respect to the latter, knowledge of the literature on the relationship between attitudes and behavior is important if for no other reason than to know the limitations of the connections between these two sets of constructs.

Providing a thorough review of this literature is challenging for three reasons. First, as the SIOP Guidelines note, the term “job attitude” subsumes several ostensibly distinct constructs—for example, perceptions of fairness and support, job satisfaction, job involvement, organizational commitment, and work engagement (for further discussion of the many variables described as “job attitudes,” see Brief, 1998; Harrison, Newman, & Roth, 2006). Because of their large number, it is difficult for one person to develop expertise in every type of job attitude (or expertise in the relationships among these attitudes). And in many instances, an individual researcher may have developed expertise in one attitude while generally neglecting the others.

To address this challenge, Chapters 3 through 10 each focus on an individual job attitude. We include the following as suggested by the competency: perceptions of justice, perceptions of organizational support, job involvement, commitment, job satisfaction, and engagement. And, based on reviewer suggestions, we also include chapters on organizational identification and job embeddedness. We included an additional chapter focusing on team-based attitudes—a timely topic, given that work in modern organizations often occurs within a team context (Devaraj & Jiang, 2019; Shuffler et al., 2018). Each chapter was authored by experts on that particular job attitude. And in the closing chapter we critically evaluate the state of the job attitude literature, noting themes and limitations that cut across the various attitudes. We suggest future directions for job attitude research. And based on what we know as a result of this book, we made some practical implications for organizations to consider.

Second, the inconsistencies in how researchers have used the term “attitudes” has added to the difficulty in organizing this book. When we questioned past and present members of SIOP’s Education and Training Committee (e.g., Janet Barnes-Farrell, Jeannette Cleveland, Whitney Botsford Morgan, Stephanie Payne, personal communications, 2019), they affirmed something that we suspected from the outset—that researchers often use the term “job attitudes” as a catch-all phrase for several workplace psychological constructs. Our experience editing this book reinforces this suspicion. The chapters in this book define such terms as perceptions, identities, bonds, and motivational states with only the job satisfaction chapter clearly reflecting a “job attitude.” However, because the SIOP competency considers them together, we include them in the current book. Again, in the final chapter, we attempt to untangle these constructs and then organize them in a more coherent way.

The sheer volume of job attitude research presents a final challenge to reviewing the literature. A recent Google Scholar search using the term “job satisfaction,” for example, yielded over 1.7 million references (see Table 1.1). Although less widely studied than job satisfaction, the remaining job attitudes examined in the current book have each been referenced several thousand times. Needless to say, we have a lot of ground to cover. Our goal in this opening chapter is to clear a path for the subsequent chapters. We first define the term “job attitude.” We then discuss why job attitudes (and the other workplace psychological constructs) are important—what, in other words, are their theoretical and practical significance? Finally, we present an overview of the subsequent chapters.

Table 1.1 Number of Google Scholar References in Various Job Attitude Constructs

Job Attitude	Number of Google Scholar References	Chapter
Organizational Justice	> 91,000	3
Perceived Organizational Support	~ 58,000	4
Organizational Identification	> 42,000	5
Job involvement	> 49,000	6
Organizational Commitment	~ 476,000	7
Job Embeddedness	> 10,000	8
Job Satisfaction	> 1,700,000	9
Employee Engagement	~ 110,000	10

Note: These results were based on a Google Scholar search conducted on April 30, 2020.

Defining Job Attitudes and Other Workplace Psychological Constructs

In describing the nature of job attitudes, I-O psychologists draw heavily from the social psychological definition of the term “attitude.” Social psychologists describe attitudes as representing a person’s evaluative response toward an attitude object (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). As Wagner notes in Chapter 2, attitudes have valence—a positive or negative direction (e.g., good vs. bad)—and they differ in the intensity associated with that valence (e.g., extremely good vs. moderately bad; Wagner, Chapter 2, [page 14]). Attitudes, in other words, are directed toward something, such as a group of people (e.g., immigrants), a specific person (e.g., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), an idea (e.g., capitalism), or a physical object (e.g., blue jeans). In the case of job attitudes, the attitude object is workplace-related. Commonly studied workplace-related attitude objects include one’s job, employer, or the concept of being employed. Note that job attitude objects may vary in their level of abstraction. The most general conceptualization of job satisfaction, for instance, is global satisfaction—a person’s overall level of satisfaction with his or her job (Spector, 1997). More specific facets of job satisfaction include satisfaction with (a) work tasks, (b) supervision, (c) coworkers, (d) pay, and (e) promotional opportunities (Bowling, Wagner, & Beehr, 2018; Smith, Kendall, & Hulin, 1969). These facets can be further divided into more specific dimensions. Pay satisfaction, for instance, comprises several dimensions, including satisfaction with pay level, pay raises, and pay administration (Heneman & Schwab, 1985).

Social psychologists have further describe attitudes as having both affective and cognitive components (see Brief, 1998). The former reflects how a person feels toward the attitude object; the latter reflects what a person thinks or believes about the attitude object. Indeed, the distinction between affect and cognition is reflected in the content of job attitude measures (see Brief & Roberson, 1989; Moorman, 1993; Schleicher et al., 2015). To understand this distinction, consider the difference between the hypothetical items “I like my supervisor” and “My supervisor is competent.” The first item clearly contains affect (note the word “like”), whereas the second item is more cognitive—it reflects a “cold,” ostensibly factual description of one’s supervisor.

Although social psychologists often define attitudes as also including a behavioral component, most I-O psychologists consider behaviors to be a consequence of job attitudes and not part of the job attitude construct per se (see Judge et al., 2001). Attitudes and behavior, in other words, are conceptually different; the former reflect internal psychological states, whereas the latter reflect outwardly observable actions. This distinction is also borne out of the end of the SIOP competency, 7: “…knowledge of the literature on the relationship between attitudes and behavior is important if for no other reason than to know the limitations of the connections between these two sets of constructs” (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Inc. 2016).

The SIOP competency also includes the words “beliefs” and “opinions,” although in our conversations with members of the SIOP Guidelines committee, no one could recall why those particular terms were used, other than to acknowledge the fact that some of the constructs/measures might not technically be classified as attitudes. What is more interesting to note, though, is that the authors in many of the subsequent chapters do not use the terms “beliefs” or “opinions” either; rather, as noted above, they use “perceptions,” “identity,” “bonds,” and “motivational states” which are all distinct from attitudes and have their own social psychological bases. We will address these terms later in this chapter, throughout the subsequent chapters, then again in more detail in the final chapter. But because I-O psychologists refer to these job-related psychological constructs as “job attitudes,” we continue to use that term for this chapter.

The Importance of Job Attitudes

The size of its research literature attests to the importance of job attitudes (see Table 1.1). But what’s with all the fuss? Why do I-O psychologists seem to care so much about job attitudes? There are four primary answers to this question: (a) job attitudes are inherently valuable, (b) they provide organizations with diagnostic information, (c) they can be used for assessing the effectiveness of organizational interventions, and (d) they are potential causes of key organizational outcomes (see Spector, 1997). We review each of these in the following subsections.

Job Attitudes are Inherently Valuable

The professional associations that I-O psychologists typically belong to—including the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, Academy of Management, and SIOP—encourage their members to use their skills for the betterment of society. Principle A of the APA’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, for instance, states that “Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work . . .” One way that I-O psychologists can satisfy this mandate is through research and practice aimed at improving workers’ job attitudes. And indeed, there are good reasons to believe that improved job attitudes contribute to a better society—job attitudes (particularly job satisfaction) may contribute to more general forms of well-being (e.g., overall life satisfaction; Bowling, Eschleman, & Wang, 2010), they may relate...