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• Attitude


  Certain regularities of an individual's feelings, thoughts and predispositions to act toward some aspect of his environment
• Components of attitude

  • Affective-person's physiological responses
  • Cognitive-person's perception of the object of the attitude, and/or what the person says they believe about that object
  • Behavioral-person's observable behaviour toward the object of the attitude and/or what they say about that behaviour
• Attitudes refer to a particular target, or object
• There can be some differences between the three components of attitude
• Purposes of attitudes

  • Help us make sense of our environment and act effectively within it
  • Help us define and maintain our sense of self-identity and self-esteem
  • Help us maintain good relations with other people, particularly those who have the power to reward or punish us
• Cognitive representation of attitudes

  • An object label and rules for applying it
  • An evaluative summary of that object
  • A knowledge structure supporting the evaluative summary
• Measuring attitudes

  • Almost always assessed using self-report questionnaires
  • Thurstone scaling and Likert scaling are frequently used
• Attitude measurement result

  A measure of how extreme a person's attitude is: strongly like, mildly like, indifferent, mildly dislike, strongly dislike
• Important topics in attitude measurement

  • Attitude strength
  • Attitude salience
  • Attitude extremity
• Factors that increase correspondence between attitudes and behaviour

  • When the object of the attitude is both well-defined and salient
  • When attitude strength is high
  • When knowledge supporting the attitude is plentiful and complex
  • When the attitude supports important aspects of the self
• Theory of reasoned action (theory of planned behaviour)


  Includes an extra step in the attitude-behaviour link: intention
• In the theory of planned behaviour, 'attitude' is defined in precise and rather unusual terms – it concerns beliefs and personal values about the consequences of a specific behaviour, and not general beliefs or feelings about an object or person</b>
• Subjective norm takes into account both the opinions of other people and the person's wish (or lack of it) to comply with those opinions
• Job satisfaction


  A 'pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's job or job experiences'
• Aspects of job that influence satisfaction

  • Pay
  • Working conditions
  • Colleagues and boss
  • Career prospects
  • Intrinsic aspects of the job itself
• Approaches to job satisfaction

  • Stable positive or negative dispositions learned through experience
  • Social information processing-job satisfaction and other workplace attitudes are developed or constructed out of experiences and information provided by others at work
  • Information-processing model-based on the accumulation of cognitive information about the workplace and one's job
• Measures of job satisfaction

  • Cognitive Component: Job Description Index (JDI), Job Satisfaction Scales of Warr et al., The Overall Job Satisfaction Scale, The Job Satisfaction Survey
  • Affective Component: 1 I find real enjoyment in my job, 2 I like my job better than the average person, 3 Most days I am enthusiastic about my job, 4 I feel fairly well satisfied with my job
• Core constructs of job satisfaction

  • Skill variety
  • Task identity
  • Task significance
  • Autonomy
  • Feedback
• Leader behaviours such as initiating structure and consideration

  Significant and positive correlations with job satisfaction
• Job satisfaction


  Possible that it causes some job perceptions (e.g. working with a smile)
• Dark Triad of leadership traits

  Psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism
• These Dark Triad traits are thought to be linked to some particularly unpleasant leadership behaviours including deceit, engaging in manipulation and ridicule of others, unfairly blaming others for mistakes, and harassment
• Organizational commitment

  The relative strength of an individual's identification with and involvement in an organisation
• Components of organizational commitment

  • A desire to maintain membership in the organisation
  • Belief in and acceptance of the values and goals of the organisation
  • A willingness to exert effort on behalf of the organisation
• Types of organizational commitment

  • Affective commitment - 'I want to stay'
  • Continuance commitment - 'I need to stay'
  • Normative commitment - 'I feel I should stay'
• Low affective commitment to the supervisor


  A good predictor of employee turnover, and when coupled with low affective commitment to the organisation the chance of employee turnover was significantly increased
• Approaches to organizational commitment

  • Behavioural approach-commitment is created when a person does things publicly, of their own free will, and that would be difficult to undo
  • Self-perception approach-people examine their own behaviour and conclude that since they did something with significant consequences in full view of others, when they could have chosen not to do so, they really must be committed to it
• Highly committed people


  More likely than less committed people to help others in the organisation
• Employee turnover


  Can have significant implications for organisations, including the cost of hiring and training new staff, disruption to teamwork, and organising people to cover the work done by those who have left
• Mechanisms of employee turnover

  • Enthusiastic leavers
  • Reluctant leavers
  • Enthusiastic stayers: 'engaged stayers' and 'slackers'
  • Reluctant stayers: 'Reluctant stayers' and 'Contractual stayers'
• Age


  Tends to be linked to tenure, with older adults tending to have less intense emotional experiences, lower self-efficacy, and a greater desire for high-quality interpersonal relationships which might be provided by long-term employment
• Psychological contract


  An individual's belief regarding the terms and conditions of a reciprocal exchange agreement between the focal person and another party, typically the employing firm and its agents
• The psychological contract should not be confused with the legally binding employment contract (although they might overlap, e.g. in terms of working hours, pay, etc.)
• In the psychological contract, there is a belief that the agreement is mutual and binding
• Types of psychological contracts

  • Relational Contracts: offer most mutual trust and stability
  • Transactional Contracts: based more on money and well-defined specific performance terms
  • Transitional Contracts: typical of an eroding relationship between the employer and the employee (short-term, non-specific performance)
  • Balanced Contracts: mutual expectations are flexible and dynamic (long-term, specific performance)
• Development of the psychological contract

  • Early stages of contact between the employee and the employer, even before the employee starts work
  • Giving prospective employees a realistic job preview
  • Newcomers' expectations can change over time
  • Psychological contracts can be breached, and these breaches can be quite common (usually by employers) in the first two years of employment
• How employees might perceive a breach of the psychological contract

  • Almost all the promises made by my employer during recruitment have been kept so far (agreement=no breach)
  • I feel that my employer has come through in fulfilling the promises made to me when I was hired (agreement=no breach)
  • So far my employer has done an excellent job of fulfilling its promises to me (agreement=no breach)
  • I have not received everything promised to me in exchange for my contributions (agreement=breach)
  • My employer has broken many of its promises to me even though I've upheld my side of the deal (agreement=breach)