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Work-related employee attitudes and organisational performance


- Wayne F. Cascio


D


oes it matter to the performance of a business unit or organisation what employees think about their jobs, their co-workers, and their supervisors? Do business units or organisations with more highly engaged employees – those who perform with more vigour, dedication, and absorption in their work – outperform those with less engaged employees? Before we begin, let us define some important terms.


Job satisfaction, commitment, and


engagement are important work-related attitudes – internal states that are focused on particular aspects of or objects in the environment. As we will see shortly, these work- related attitudes are similar in meaning, yet there are important differences among them as well.


Attitudes are often multi-dimensional. Thus, for example, job satisfaction is a multidimensional attitude. In its 2009 survey of employees from small, medium, and large companies in a wide range of industries, the Society for Human Resource Management found that the top five drivers of job satisfaction were job security, benefits, compensation/pay, opportunities to use skills and abilities, and a safe feeling in the work environment. Of course it is reasonable to expect that there may well be cultural, generational, and gender differences, among others, in the relative preferences of individuals for various drivers of job satisfaction.


58 Management Today | March 2012


As Cascio and Boudreau (2011) noted, job satisfaction is related to, but not identical with, employee engagement. Job satisfaction is an outcome. Engagement connotes activation – feelings of energy, enthusiasm, and a positive affective state. Although conceptually distinct, the two are highly correlated.


Likewise, organisational commitment is a bond or linking of an individual to the organisation that makes it difficult to leave. It is the emotional engagement that people feel toward a firm. Commitment can be to the job or the organisation and can take the form of a commitment to contribute, to stay, or both.


Commitment is closely related to the concept of employee engagement. Engagement is a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterised by vigour, dedication, and absorption. Vigour refers to high levels of energy and mental resilience while working, the willingness to invest effort in one’s work, and persistence even in the face of difficulties. Dedication is characterised by a sense of significance, enthusiasm, inspiration, pride, and challenge at work. Absorption consists of being so fully concentrated, happy, and deeply engrossed in one’s work that time passes quickly and one has difficulty detaching oneself from work.


Engagement fuels discretionary efforts and concern for quality. It is what prompts


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