People and Organizations

Attitudes and Job Satisfaction

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Heiko Breitsohl

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Learning Objectives
1. Contrast the three components of an attitude.
2. Summarize the relationship between attitudes and behavior.
3. Compare the major job attitudes.
4. Identify the two approaches for measuring job satisfaction.
5. Summarize the main causes of job satisfaction.
6. Identify three outcomes of job satisfaction.
7. Identify four employee responses to job dissatisfaction.

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Attitudes
• Attitudes: evaluative statements – either favorable or
unfavorable – concerning objects, people, or events
– Reflect how one feels about something

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The Components of an Attitude

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Attitudes and Behavior
• The most powerful moderators of the attitude-behavior
relationships are:
– Importance
– Correspondence to behavior
– Accessibility
– Social pressures
– Direct personal experience
• Knowing attitudes helps predict behavior

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Attitudes and Behavior
• Cognitive dissonance: any inconsistency between two or more
attitudes, or between behavior and attitudes
– Individuals seek to minimize dissonance

• Desire to reduce dissonance is determined by:

– The importance of the elements creating the dissonance
– The degree of influence the individual believes he or she has over the
elements
– The rewards that may be involved in dissonance

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Some important job attitudes
• Job satisfaction
• Job involvement
– Degree to which people psychologically identify with their jobs
• Psychological empowerment
– Beliefs in the degree of influence over the job, competence on the job,
autonomy, and job meaningfulness
• Organizational commitment
– The degree to which an employee wishes to maintain membership in the
organization
• Perceived organizational support
– The degree to which employees believe the organization values their
contributions and cares about their well-being

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Some important job attitudes
• Employee engagement
– The degree of enthusiasm an employee feels for the job
– High cost of disengagement
– Affect on organizational outcomes

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How Do I Measure Job Satisfaction?
• Measuring job satisfaction:
1. Single global rating method
• Only a few general questions
2. Summation score method
• Identifies key elements in the job and asks for specific feeling about them

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What Causes Job Satisfaction?
• Job Conditions
– The intrinsic nature of the work itself
– Social interactions
– Supervision
• Personality: Positive core self-evaluations (CSEs)
• Pay: Effect levels off with increasing pay
• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

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Outcomes of Job Satisfaction
• Better job and organizational performance
• Better organizational citizenship behaviors
• Greater levels of customer satisfaction
• Improved life satisfaction

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The Impact of Job Dissatisfaction
• Exit: directs behavior toward leaving the organization
• Voice: includes actively and constructively attempting to improve
conditions
• Loyalty: passively but optimistically waiting for conditions to
improve
• Neglect: passively allows conditions to worsen

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Counterproductive Work Behavior
• Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB)
– Actions that actively damage the organization
– Deviant behavior in the workplace, or simply withdrawal behavior
– Job dissatisfaction predicts CWB
• Absenteeism
• Turnover

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Discussion Question
• Have you encountered causes and/or outcomes of job
satisfaction?

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People and Organizations
Emotions and Moods

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Heiko Breitsohl

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Learning Objectives
1. Differentiate between emotions and moods.
2. Identify the sources of emotions and moods.
3. Show the impact emotional labor has on employees.
4. Describe emotional intelligence.
5. Identify strategies for emotion regulation.
6. Apply concepts about emotions and moods to specific OB issues.

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Affect, Emotions, and Moods

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The Basic Moods: Positive and Negative Affect
• Positive affect: a mood dimension consisting of positive
emotions such as excitement, enthusiasm, and elation at the high
end (high positive affect) and boredom, depression, and fatigue
at the low end (low positive affect)
• Negative affect: a mood dimension consisting of nervousness,
stress, and anxiety at the high end (high negative affect) and
contentedness, calmness, and serenity at the low end (low
negative affect)

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The Affective Circumplex

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The Basic Emotions
• Six universal emotions
– Anger
– Fear
– Sadness
– Happiness
– Disgust
– Surprise

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Sources of Emotions and Moods
• Personality
– Some people experience certain moods and emotions more frequently
than others
– Affect intensity: experiencing the same emotions with different
intensities
• Time of day
– People vary in their moods by time of day
• Day of the week
– People tend to be in their best mood Friday to Sunday

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Time-of-Day Effects on Mood
U.S. Adults as Rated From Twitter Postings

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Sources of Emotions and Moods
• Weather
– Illusory correlation
• No impact according to research
• Stress
– Increased stress worsens moods
• Sleep
– Lack of sleep increases negative emotions and impairs decision making
• Exercise
– Enhances positive mood
• Gender
– Trivial differences
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Emotional Labor
• Emotional labor: an employee’s expression of organizationally
desired emotions during interpersonal transactions at work
• Emotional dissonance: when an employee has to project one
emotion while simultaneously feeling another

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Felt vs. Displayed Emotions
• Felt Emotions:
– The individual’s actual emotions
• Displayed Emotions:
– The learned emotions that the organization requires workers to show
and considers appropriate in a given job
– Surface Acting – hiding one’s true emotions
– Deep Acting – trying to change one’s feelings based on display rules

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Emotional “Intelligence”
• Emotional “intelligence”: a person’s ability to:
– Perceive emotions in the self and others
– Understand the meaning of these emotions
– Regulate one’s emotions accordingly

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Emotion Regulation
• Emotion regulation: identifying and modifying the emotions you
feel
• Emotion regulation influences and outcomes
– Personality
– Workplace environment
• Emotion regulation techniques
– Cognitive reappraisal (reframing)
– Social sharing (venting)

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Discussion Questions
• How is understanding affect, emotions, and moods important for
managing organizations?

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People and Organizations
Personality and Values

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Heiko Breitsohl

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Learning Objectives
1. Describe the differences between person-job fit and person-organization
fit.
2. Describe personality, the way it is measured, and the factors that shape it.
3. Describe the strengths and weaknesses of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
(MBTI) personality framework, the Big Five Model, and the Dark Triad.
4. Discuss how the concepts of core self-evaluation (CSE), self-monitoring,
and proactive personality contribute to the understanding of personality.
5. Describe how the situation affects whether personality predicts behavior.
6. Contrast terminal and instrumental values.
7. Compare Hofstede’s five value dimensions and the GLOBE framework.

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Person-Organization Fit
• It is more important that employees’ personalities fit with the
organizational culture than with the characteristics of any specific
job
• The fit predicts job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and
turnover

• Person-job fit
• Person-group fit

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Personality
• Personality: the sum total of ways in which an individual reacts to
and interacts with the world around us
• Personality traits
– Enduring characteristics that describe an individual’s behavior

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Measuring Personality
• Personality assessments are useful in hiring decisions
– Help managers forecast who is best for a job
• Self-report surveys
– Most common
– Useful, but somewhat prone to error
• Observer-ratings surveys
– More reliable, particularly with several raters

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Personality Frameworks:
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
• Most widely used personality-assessment instrument in the world
• Individuals are classified as:
– Extroverted or Introverted (E/I)
– Sensing or Intuitive (S/N)
– Thinking or Feeling (T/F)
– Judging or Perceiving (J/P)
• Classifications combined into 16 personality types (i.e., INTJ or
ESTJ)

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Problems with the MBTI
• Developed by laypeople
• Based on outdated theory
• Personality “types” do not really exist
• Results are not reliable
• Does not predict job performance

• Do not use it
• Popularity (“positive results”) is irrelevant

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Personality Frameworks: The Big Five Model
• Five basic dimensions encompass most of the differences in
human personality
– Extraversion
– Agreeableness
– Conscientiousness
– Emotional Stability (vs. Neuroticism)
– Openness to Experience
• Strongly supported relationship to job performance (especially
conscientiousness)

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How Big Five Traits Influence OB Criteria

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Other Frameworks
• The HEXACO model
– Honesty/humility is added to the Big Five
– H dimension
– Sincere, fair, modest, and humble

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The Dark Triad
• The Dark Triad
1. Machiavellianism
• High “machs” tend to be pragmatic, emotionally distant, and believe the ends justify
the means
2. Narcissism
• A person with a grandiose view of self, requires excessive admiration, has a sense of
self-entitlement, and is arrogant
3. Psychopathy
• A lack of concern for others, and a lack of guilt or remorse when their actions cause
harm

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Other Personality Attributes Relevant to OB
• Core self-evaluations
– People with positive core self-evaluation like themselves and see
themselves as capable and effective in the workplace
• Self-monitoring
– Ability to adjust behavior to meet external, situational factors
• Proactive personality
– Identifies opportunities, shows initiative, takes action, and perseveres
until meaningful change occurs

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Personality and Situations
• The effect of particular traits on organization behavior depends
on the situation
• Two frameworks
1. Situation Strength Theory
2. Trait Activation Theory

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Situation Strength Theory
• The way personality translates into behavior depends on the strength of
the situation
• Components of situation strength
– Clarity
– Consistency
– Constraints
– Consequences

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Trait Activation Theory
• Trait activation theory (TAT)
– predicts that some situations, events, or interventions “activate” a trait
more than others

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Trait Activation Theory: Jobs in Which Certain
Big Five Traits Are More Relevant

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Discussion Question
• Can you think of examples for trait-activating situations in your
life as a student?

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Values
• Values
– Relatively basic, enduring convictions that a specific mode of conduct or
end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite
or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence
• Value systems
– Represent a prioritizing of individual values by:
• Content
• Intensity

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Terminal versus Instrumental Values
• Terminal values: desirable end-states of existence
• Goals that a person would like to achieve during his or her
lifetime i.e: family

• Instrumental values: preferable modes of behavior or means of

achieving the terminal values
values that i use to achieving something

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Generational Values
• Shared views of different cohorts/generations in the workforce
• Lack solid research support
– Births occur continuously, not in groups
– Important events affect everyone, not just young people
– “Generational” (cohort) effects are often empirically indistinguishable
from age effects and/or period effects
• Perpetuate stereotypes

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Discussion Question
• Generational values lack solid research support. Yet differences
are perpetuated as stereotypes. Discuss several of these
stereotypes and why they are detrimental to organizations.

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Cultural Values
• Values are learned and differ across cultures
• Two frameworks for assessing culture:
– Hofstede
– GLOBE
coultures can share some values,

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Hofstede and GLOBE

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• Questions?

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Up next…
• Perception and Individual Decision Making

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