The Major Job Attributes.

 

Job involvement

This is related to job satisfaction and measures the degree to which people identify psychologically with their job. Employees with a high level of job involvement strongly identify with and really care about the kind of work they do. 

 

Closely related to job involvement is also psychological empowerment which is the employees’ beliefs in the degree to which they influence their work environment, their competence, the meaningfulness of their job and their perceived autonomy. High levels of these two are positively related to organisational citizenship and job performance. In fact, high job involvement is also related to reduced absences and lower resignation rates.

 

Organizational Commitment

An employee identifies with a particular organization and its goals and wishes to remain a member. There are three separate dimensions to organizational commitment:

1. Affective commitment is an emotional attachment to the organization and a belief in its values. For example, a zoo employee may be affectively committed to the company because of its involvement in animals.

2. Continuance commitment is the perceived economic value of remaining with an organization. An employee may be committed to an employer because she is paid well and feels it would hurt her family to quit.

3. Normative commitment is an obligation to remain with the organization for moral or ethical reasons. An employee spearheading a new initiative may remain with an employer because he feels he would “leave the employer in the lurch” if he left.

 

Perceived organizational support (POS)

POS is the degree to which employees believe the organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being, for example being able to forgive an honest mistake or help out if an accident occurs. Research shows that people perceive their organization as supportive when rewards are deemed fair, when employees have a voice in decisions and when they see their supervisors as supportive. Research suggests employees with strong POS perceptions are more likely to have higher levels of organizational citizenship behaviors, lower levels of tardiness (being late) and performing better customer service.

 

Employee Engagement

A relatively new concept where an individual’s involvement with, satisfaction with and enthusiasm for the work she does. Highly engaged employees have a passion for their work and feel a deep connection to their company; disengaged employees have essentially checked out - putting time but not energy or attention into their work. Engagement has becomes a real concern for most organizations as many surveys indicated that only a few employees (between 17 percent and 29 percent) are highly engaged by their work.

 

Are these job attitudes really that distinct?

Well, that’s the tricky part. Evidence suggest that these attitudes are highly related to each other, perhaps to a troubling degree. For example, the correlation between perceived organizational support and affective commitment is very strong. That means the variables may be redundant because if you know someone’s affective commitment, you also know the perceived organizational support. Meaning two concepts for the same thing as they greatly overlap and hence its efficiency is questioned. Why have two steering wheel on a car when you only need one?

 

Then there is also a question of personality of the employee. Some people are predisposed to be positive or negative about almost everything so if someone say she loves or her company, it may not mean much if she is equally positive about everything in her life...