Application of attitude strength to job satisfaction: The moderating role of attitude strength in the prediction of organizational outcomes from job satisfaction.

摘要

Job satisfaction has traditionally been defined as a job attitude or summated feelings toward the job and has been empirically demonstrated to be related to a variety of organizationally relevant outcomes. These outcomes include employee performance, absenteeism and turnover, motivation, job involvement, organizational commitment, and employee physical and psychological well-being. Although significantly related, the relationships between satisfaction and outcome variables are generally quite modest (r = +/-.20). In addition, the strength of the relationships between satisfaction and each outcome can vary greatly from study to study, consisting of both positive and negative relationship between the same variables.; To deal with these issues, there has been a growing appeal for satisfaction researchers to apply attitude theory to the study of job satisfaction. Some researchers propose that job satisfaction is structurally no different from social attitudes, except that the focus of the evaluation is the job rather than a social object. Thus, if both job satisfaction and social attitudes are conceptually similar, it may be fruitful to examine the attitude literature to help better understand job satisfaction.; Attitudes are defined as relatively stable predispositions to respond to an attitudinal object in either a favorable or unfavorable manner. Recent attitude research has demonstrated that some attitudes act as stable predispositions, having strong impact upon people's thoughts and actions, while other attitudes are less stable, having less of an influence upon our thoughts and actions. One attitudinal feature that distinguishes these two kinds of attitudes is termed "attitude strength." Indeed, the attitude strength literature has demonstrated numerous cases where attitude strength acts as a moderator of relationships between attitudes and behavioral outcomes.; The current study developed measures to assess the level of attitude strength associated with job satisfaction and empirically tested the relationship between attitude strength and job satisfaction in the prediction of outcome variables. It was hypothesized that job satisfaction would be significantly related to outcomes when high levels of attitude strength were present yet not be significantly related to outcome variables when attitude strength was low.; An examination of 248 part-time and full-time employees and their corresponding managers confirmed the study hypothesis for seven of the 15 included outcome variables. Job satisfaction was consistently found to have a significantly stronger relationship with employee job involvement, intention to quit, life satisfaction, affective organizational commitment, employee altruism, employee courtesy, and self-rated employee performance when attitude strength was high as compared to low. Study limitations and suggestions for future research are also addressed.