FACTORS PRODUCING EMPLOYEE AND DISSATISFACTION WITHIN APEX CORP

Factors Producing Employee and Dissatisfaction within APEX Corp

Factors Producing Employee and Dissatisfaction Within APEX Corp.

Introduction

Job dissatisfaction at APEX matters. It matters to organizations, to managers, to customers, and perhaps most of all to employees. Job dissatisfaction is by definition unpleasant, and most individuals are conditioned, probably even biologically-driven, to respond to unpleasant conditions by searching for mechanisms to reduce the dissatisfaction. This drive towards adaptation is as natural and inevitable in workplaces as it is in any other environment. But for better or worse, it has gathered particular attention among organizational researchers because employees' adaptive mechanisms may operate in such a way as to affect organizationally-relevant outcomes, ranging from changes in job performance to such withdrawal behaviors as absence or turnover. Thus it is not surprising that a rich literature concerning job satisfaction and dissatisfaction exists in the Organizational Behavior domain.

What is less prevalent in this domain is agreement about the strength of the relationship between individual and organizational outcomes and job (dis)satisfaction and related states. Empirical associations between job satisfaction and various behavioral outcomes have been inconsistent and generally modest in size (Blau, 1998). More seriously—and perhaps at the root of the problem—the processes underlying the associations have remained a black box for the most part. Rosse and his colleagues (Miller & Rosse, 2002a; Rosse & Noel, 1996), among others, have suggested that one potential avenue for improving our understanding of this adaptive process among employees is to explore personological factors that may help explain why different employees respond differently to similar sources and levels of dissatisfaction. The primary purpose of this study is to begin systematically exploring this possibility.

A Theoretical Approach to Employee Adaptation

There is substantial agreement that job satisfaction at APEX is negatively related to employee behaviors that represent withdrawal from, or avoidance of, unpleasant work conditions. This can be seen most clearly in associations between job satisfaction and intent to quit or actual turnover, as well as with voluntary absenteeism and, tentatively, with lateness. However, as meta-analytic reviews have shown, these relations are modest in magnitude and consistency (Farrell & Stamm, 1988; Griffeth, Hom, & Gaertner, 2000).

Faced with these results, a group of researchers began to reconsider the nature of the relationship between job satisfaction and employee behaviors. Based on an extensive social psychological literature on the relations between attitudes and behaviors, theorists argued that it made little sense to expect strong correlations between general attitudes (such as job dissatisfaction) and specific behaviors (such as turnover or absenteeism). Rather, one should expect far better explanatory power if such broadband attitudes were used to predict comparably broadband measures of the behaviors of interest.

This insight led to substantial attention at APEX to the behavior side of the job attitude—behavior equation, in the search for underlying behavioral families. Hulin, & Roznowski, (1998) showed that behaviors such as being late or absent, quitting, thinking about retirement, and reducing work effort may fit into two broader families of job withdrawal ...