Job satisfaction and

organizational commitment
Presented by: bba-5
 Group members

Tania Shaheen FA13-BS(BA)-019

Marya Sabir FA13-BS(BA)-039
 Organizational psychology

Industrial and organizational psychology (also

known as IO psychology, ) is the scientific
study of human behavior at their workplace and
applies psychological theories and principles to
organizations and individuals at their
workplace.
Core concepts of I-O psychology

Organizational or industrial psychology has two core topics/concepts

which are illustrated as under:
Job satisfaction
Organizational commitment
What is job satisfaction?
 What is job satisfaction?

Job satisfaction is typically defined as:

an employees level of positive affect towards his or her job or

job situation
 Components of job satisfaction

There are three components of job satisfaction and these are as follows:

Affective/ evaluative component ( feelings)

Cognitive component (beliefs)

Behavioral component (behaviors)

Components
Theoretical approaches to job satisfaction

Job characteristics
approach

Social information Job

process approach satisfaction
Dispositional
approach
 Comparison

Job characteristic approach Hulin approach(1991)

Job satisfaction is primarily Job satisfaction develops in

measured by nature of employees response to job conditions. (work
job or by the characteristics of the hours, rest period and work schedule)

organization in which they work.

Job characteristic model
Common theme among these approaches

job satisfaction is largely determined by employees comparison of what

the job is currently providing them and what they would like it to be
provide
Basis of perception
The perceptions of employees about the
job satisfaction are based upon the
following factors:

Employees skills

The amount of time they have put into

the job

Availability of other employment

opportunities
Lockes argument
According to him:

job characteristics approach was oversimplified because it does

not account for the fact that employees differ in the importance
they place on various facets of work
Range of affect theory (Locke 1976)

The basic premise of range of affect theory is

that:

facets of the work are differently

weighted when employees make their
assessments of job satisfaction
Facets of job
 Major Challenges

First major challenge to this approach came in late 1970s in form of social
information processing theory (SIP).

It was criticized on two points:

It was based on assumption that job characteristics were objective

components of the work environment. However jobs are social constructs
which exist in the minds of employees not the objective components.

This approach was based upon the need satisfaction.

 Social information processing approach

According to this approach:

verbal comments about the task characteristics, had at least as

powerful impact on job satisfaction and perceptions of task
characteristics as the objective characteristics of the task
Social comparison theory

Festinger (1954) proposed a theory named as

Social comparison theory to define job
satisfaction. This theory states that:

people often look to others to interpret

and make sense of the environment.
Social comparison theory

Example:
When a new employee interacts with the
dissatisfied employee of an organization would
also likely become dissatisfied and vice-versa.
Challenges to SIP approach
According to Hulin:

This approach is more successful in laboratory rather then field

studies, because they simplify the social influence process. It only
explains the information in terms of discrete data like positive or
negative

It does not tell anything about the conflicting information that

employees may receive form various sources.
Disposition approach

According to this approach to job

satisfaction:

some employees have tendency to

be satisfied (or dissatisfied) with their
jobs, regardless of the nature of the
job or organization in which they
work.
Important evidence for dispositional
approach
Most important evidence for dispositional
approach was provided by Arvey, Segal
and Abraham (1989).

In this study they found approximately

30% of variance could be attributed to
genetic factors. (by experimenting
twins)
 Limitations

A major limitation was that:

it was imprecise as to exactly which

dispositions are related to job satisfaction
(Davis Blake and Pfeffer, 1989)
limitations
This approach have been failed to explain
the practical implications of dispositional
effects.

This approach is ignoring the situational

factors which affects the employees job
satisfaction level.

It might be assumed that job satisfaction is

linked with specific traits of the person
but we cant apply this logic while hiring the
employees.
Which approach is more appropriate to
job satisfaction?

Job characteristics approach

Social information processing

Dispositional approach
 Construct validity

Construct validity defines how well a test or

experiment measures up to its claims. It refers
to whether the operational definition of a
variable actually reflect the true theoretical
meaning of a concept.
 Tests for construct validity

In general there are three tests of construct validity and these are:

Convergence

Discrimination

Nomo logical networks

 Measurement of job satisfaction

There are several measures of job satisfaction. Some are described as under:

Faces scale

Job descriptive index (JDI)

Minnesota satisfaction questionnaire (MSQ)

Job satisfaction survey (JSS)

Faces scale
 Faces scale

Advantages
Simplicity
Respondents need not possess a high
reading level in order to complete it.
Disadvantages
It does not provide information
about the employees satisfaction
with different facets of job.

It can be used for the employees

having low level of education.
Job descriptive index (JDI)
 JDI

Advantages Disadvantages
It provides score for individual facet It does not help to measure the
of job like pay, benefits, supervision overall satisfaction level of
etc. employee.

Great deal of data supports its

construct validity.
Minnesota satisfaction questionnaire
(MSQ)
It has two forms which are as follows:

Long form:
It consist of 100 items to measure the 20 facets of work.

Short form:
It consist of 20 items. This form is not designed to provide the score of the facets.
S.NO ITEMS S.NO ITEMS

01 Activity 11 Ability utilizations

02 Independence 12 Company policies and practices

03 Variety 13 Compensation

04 Social status 14 Advancement

05 Supervision (human relations) 15 Responsibility

06 Moral values 16 Creativity

07 Security 17 Working conditions

08 Social service 18 Coworkers

09 Authority 19 Recognition

10 Supervision (technical) 20 Achievement

 MSQ

Advantages Disadvantages
The MSQ provides quite extensive The only disadvantage is its length.

information on employees At 100 items the full version is very

satisfaction with various facets of difficult to administer.

job or work environment. Even the shortened form is also

longer than many others measures.
Job satisfaction survey (JSS)

It was developed for measuring job satisfaction levels of Human

Service employees.

It consist of 36 items measuring the 9 facets of job and work

environment.
Relationship of job satisfaction
with other variables
Job satisfaction is related with four other variables that have both theoretical and
practical implications. These variables are:

Attitudinal variables

Absenteeism

Employee turnover

Job performance
Attitudinal variables

Attitudinal variables are as follows:

Job involvement

Organizational commitment

Frustration

Job tension

Feeling of anxiety
Relation with job satisfaction

According to Spector (1997):

job satisfaction is positively related with
the variables that reflect positive affect
such as job involvement, organizational
commitment
Negative relation
According to Jackson (1985) and Spector
(1996):
job satisfaction is negatively related to the
variables such as frustration, job tension and
anxiety
Absenteeism

The study of absenteeism is

important for two reasons:

Theoretical perspective

Practical perspective
 Two perspectives
Theoretical perspective Practical perspective

Absenteeism represents a Absenteeism is a very costly

common way in which problem to many organizations.

employees may withdraw from When employees are absent ,

their jobs (Hulin, 1991) work may not get done or may be
performed by less experienced
employee.
Job satisfaction role in absenteeism

According to Hackett and Guion (1985):

after conducting meta-analysis on 31 studies, they found that

correlation between job satisfaction and absenteeism is -.09. This
suggests that job satisfaction may play some role in employee
absenteeism but the role is marginal
Reason for weak relationship between
job satisfaction and absenteeism

1. The basic reason is measurement of absenteeism itself. There are

two types of absence that is:

Excused absences (allowed for illness and funerals)

Un-excused absences (employee does not show up at work)

One could argue that job satisfaction would be more likely to play a
role in un-excused than in excused absences.
Continued..
2. Ajzen and Fishbein (1977) proposed a theory to define the weak relationship
between job satisfaction and absenteeism named as Theory of Reasoned Action

This theory states that:

a complex pathway links general attitudes (such as job satisfaction) to actual

behavior

Job satisfaction may be weakly related to absenteeism because of a failure to account

for unmeasured variables such as normative standards etc.
Continued.

3. Another reason is that ; absenteeism is a behavior that

has low base rate (i.e. it does not occur frequently)

Low base rate is problematic because different statistical

analysis like regression n correlation analysis are based
on assumptions that variables are normally distributed,
and according to different researches it was found that
absenteeism is variable which is not normally distributed.
 Continued.

In case of absenteeism the distribution may be skewed.

 Employee turnover
Employee turnover is defined as:

the number or percentage of workers who leave an organization

Impact of employee turnover

Basically there are two important impacts of employee turnover on any

organization and these are illustrated as follows:

High level of turnover can be costly in terms of recruiting, selecting

and socializing a new employee.

High level of turnover may also have an adverse impact on public

image of organization.
Mobleys model for turnover process
Job performance

Job performance assesses whether a

person performs a job well.
 Expectancy theory
Vrooms (1964) proposed a theory named as
Expectancy theory to define the job performance.
This theory states that:

employees would put forth more effort if they

believed that effort would translate into high levels of
performance and higher performance would lead to
valued outcomes
Expectancy theory
 Relationship between job satisfaction and
job performance

According to Podsakoff and Williams (1986) :

satisfaction-performance relation was moderated by the

degree to which rewards were linked to performance