When people speak of employee attitudes, they usually mean job satisfaction, a positive feeling about a job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics. A person with high job satisfaction holds positive feelings about the work, while a person with low satisfaction holds negative feelings. Because OB researchers give job satisfaction high importance, we review this attitude in detail later.

Related to job satisfaction is job involvement, the degree to which people identify psychologically with their jobs and consider their perceived performance levels important to their self-worth.8 Employees with high job involvement strongly identify with and really care about the kind of work they do. Another closely related concept is psychological empowerment—employees’ beliefs regarding the degree to which they influence their work environment, their competencies, the meaningfulness of their job, and their perceived autonomy.9

Research suggests that empowerment initiatives need to be tailored to desired behavioral outcomes. Research in Singapore found that good leaders empower their employees by fostering their self-perception of competence—through involving them in decisions, making them feel their work is important, and giving them discretion to “do their own thing.”10

An employee with organizational commitment identifies with a particular organization and its goals and wishes to remain a member. Emotional attachment to an organization and belief in its values is the “gold standard” for employee commitment.11

Employees who are committed will be less likely to engage in work withdrawal even if they are dissatisfied because they have a sense of organizational loyalty or attachment.12 Even if employees are not currently happy with their work, they are willing to make sacrifices for the organization if they are committed enough.

Perceived organizational support (POS) is the degree to which employees believe the organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being. An excellent example is Research and Development (R&D) engineer John Greene, whose POS is sky-high because when he was diagnosed with leukemia, CEO Marc Benioff and 350 fellow Salesforce.com employees covered all his medical expenses and stayed in touch with him throughout his recovery. No doubt stories like this are part of the reason Salesforce.com was the eighth of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2015.13

People perceive their organizations as supportive when rewards are deemed fair, when employees have a voice in decisions, and when they see their supervisors as supportive.14 POS is a predictor of employment outcomes, but there are some cultural inf­luences. POS is important in countries where the power distance—the degree to which people in a country accept that power in institutions and organizations is distributed une­qually—is lower. In low power-distance countries like the United States, people are more likely to view work as an exchange than as a moral obligation, so employees look for reasons to feel supported by their organizations. In high power-distance countries like China, employee POS perceptions are not as deeply based on employer demonstrations of fairness, support, and encouragement. The difference is in the level of expectation by employees.

Employee engagement is an individual’s involvement with, satisfaction with, and enthusiasm for the work he or she does. To evaluate engagement, we might ask employees whether they have access to resources and opportunities to learn new skills, whether they feel their work is important and meaningful, and whether interactions with coworkers and supervisors are rewarding.15 Highly engaged employees have a passion for their work and feel a deep connection to their companies; disengaged employees have essentially checked out, putting time but not energy or attention into their work. Engagement becomes a real concern for most organizations because so few employees—between 17 percent and 29 percent, surveys indicate—are highly engaged by their work. Employee engagement is related to job engagement, which we discuss in detail in Chapter 7.

Engagement levels determine many measurable outcomes. Promising research findings have earned employee engagement a following in many business organizations and management consulting firms. However, the concept generates active debate about its usefulness, partly because of the difficulty of identifying what creates engagement. The two top reasons for engagement that participants gave in a recent study were: (1) having a good manager they enjoy working for; and (2) feeling appreciated by their supervisor. However, most of their other reasons didn’t relate to the engagement construct.16 Another study in Australia found that emotional intelligence was linked to employee engagement.17 Other research suggested that engagement fluctuates partially due to daily challenges and demands.18

There is some distinctiveness among attitudes, but they overlap greatly for various reasons, including the employee’s personality. Altogether, if you know someone’s level of job satisfaction, you know most of what you need to know about how that person sees the organization. Let’s next dissect the concept more carefully. How do we measure job satisfaction? How satisfied are employees with their jobs?