Individual attitudes, job satisfaction, and motivation

Individual Attitudes, Job Satisfaction, And Motivation

Understanding how employees can help boost an organization's productivity and culture is an important endeavor. However, it is clear that contemporary research has failed to effectively define elements within this research topic in a way that makes them useful in practical implementation. Thus, Saair & Judge (2004) expose the gaps in the research, and how future empirical examinations may improve our knowledge and understanding of employee satisfaction.

Saair & Judge (2004) show that there are a number of major gaps in the understanding of employee satisfaction in today's contemporary research. First, there is the major gap that fails to address why employee attitudes are the way they are, essentially research examining the causes of these attitudes. Currently, there is conflicting attitudes in the HR world in trying to understand how employee attitudes impact overall organizations. Additionally, this gap often hinders HR departments understand how culture plays into the creation of employee satisfaction. In our multicultural world, it is hard to understand how very different, and sometimes conflicting cultures will interact with one another within the context of the work place, and how each individual from different cultural backgrounds will mold their perceptions of the job they are being paid to do. Secondly, there is a gap in understanding the reasoning for some employees having positive feelings on job satisfaction and others having negative. HR departments today do not know whether employee satisfaction truly improves overall productivity of the organization. Some researchers have concluded that increased levels of employee satisfaction will help boost productivity, and that HR departments and internal structures should focus on encouraging a positive work environment (Corporate Executive Board 2003). Yet, on the other hand, Saair & Judge (2004) also show how some research shows that employee satisfaction is actually tied to life satisfaction, and thus is extremely hard for employers to influence their employees in a positive light. These contradicting findings increase this gap, making it difficult to understand the situation at hand. Finally, Saair & Judge (2004) show that there is a lack of an effective and thorough technique on how to measure and encourage employee attitudes that are positive. There are simply too many contradicting methods that supposedly aim to examine this further, yet provide confusing findings when examined in correlation with other models.

Contemporary research has focused in trying to fill in the gaps. Job perception has a direct impact on job satisfaction. Thus, how one perceives one's job will directly influence whether or not that job is satisfying to that particular individual. This further ties the idea that personal disposition and characteristics heavily influence overall satisfaction. With this understanding, HR departments can focus their hiring practices to highlight individuals with characteristics and personality traits that are correlative to the organizational culture (Liao & Chuang 2004). Moreover, finding a practical method for understanding this is needed to make implementation of HR procedures more effective. A more effective model, which is still in the making, would be much more effective in helping HR departments better clarify who to hire and how to encourage employee satisfaction within individual work environments.