Individual behavior in organizations

Attitudes and Job Satisfaction I. D. Number: Term and Year Attitudes and Job Satisfaction Question 1
What is an attitude? Explain the three components of attitudes. How are attitudes related to workplace productivity?
Answer
Understanding Attitude
An attitude is a comparatively lasting psychological order of feelings, ideas, and behaviorist leaning toward culturally or socially important symbols, substances, groups, or events. (Hogg & Vaughan, 2005)
Three Components of Attitudes
Attitudes have three components. These are the affective, cognitive, and behavioral components. The emotions and feelings an individual has toward a given situation or object is contained in the affective component of his/her attitude. This component is related with one’s liking or disliking of certain things in their surroundings. Further, the ideas or beliefs a person has toward certain situational or objective entities are categorized under cognitive component. It explains why a person likes or dislikes a given entity from his/her perspective. Behavioral component explains the way a person would act or is expected to act in the case he/she comes across a certain situation or object. (Kreitner and Kinicki, 2012; Hogg and Vaughan, 2005)
Attitudes and Workplace Productivity
Attitudes give rise to an evaluative tendency on the individual’s part to like, ignore, or dislike the different entities he/she might come across in his/her lifetime. Hence, one’s attitudes often become crucial in deciding his/her propensity to execute his/her job role or the responsibilities delegated to him/her. In this way, employees’ attitudes significantly influence the workplace productivity. If the overall alignment of all the attitude components of an employee are oriented positively with respect to his/her job and/or responsibilities, he/she would understand his objectives more clearly and would further caste sincere focus toward achieving them with much ease and liking. (Kreitner and Kinicki, 2012; Eagly and Chaiken, 1993)
Question 2
Explain the five causes of job satisfaction. How important is it for a leader to a close eye on how satisfied his/her employees are?
Answer
Five Causes of Job Satisfaction
First, need fulfillment, which entails the satisfaction of an employee’s spiritual, material, and intellectual needs, can be a prime causal in creating job satisfaction. Second, discrepancies are the cause that describes the extent of the employee’s satisfaction levels with his/her need fulfillments. Discrepancies are likely to vary person to person. Third, value attainment is intricately related to the corporate, social and family responsibilities of the employee as an individual who seeks to fulfill the requirements and expectations of others beyond his/her personal or professional pursuits. Fourth, the employee is most likely to be satisfied with is job if he/she is paid or benefited in other ways fairly enough in exchange of his/her labor. Fifth, a person’s personal traits determines how much he/she is suited for the job delegated to him/her and these personal traits mostly depend on the factors like life history, genotype, etc. of the individual. (Kreitner and Kinicki, 2012; Christen et al, 2006)
Leadership and Job Satisfaction
According to a literature research conducted by Aziri (2011, p. 83), the five major job satisfaction aspects are the following:
The nature of the job,
Monetary compensation and related benefits,
Attitudes and interactions toward the supervisors,
Interrelations within the organization with colleagues, and
Opportunities for professional development
Clearly, such aspectual specifications can be correlated with job satisfaction causatives and employee’s attitudes towards the organization as a whole. If a leader turns a blind eye toward all these issues and general analyses, he/she would eventually fail to meet organizational goals and attain desired productivity levels. Initially, some imperviousness on the part of the leader may appear to be aligned with a command and control model; but in the long run, such leadership cannot prevent attrition or degradation of the skilled workers.
References
Aziri, B. (2011). Job satisfaction: A literature review. Management Research and Practice, 3, 77-86.
Christen, M., Iyer, G. and Soberman, D. (2006). Job satisfaction, job performance, and effort: A reexamination using agency theory. Journal of Marketing, 70, 137-150.
Eagly, A. H. and Chaiken, S. (1993). The Psychology of Attitudes. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Hogg, M., & Vaughan, G. (2005). Social Psychology (4th edition). London: Prentice-Hall.
Kreitner, R. and Kinicki, A. (2012). Chapter 6: Values, attitudes, job satisfaction, and counterproductive work behaviors. In: Authors (2012). Organizational Behavior. Boston: McGraw Hill, pp. 151-175.