Understanding Job Satisfaction

Attitudes color every aspect of people’s everyday lives. Attitudes certainly affect an employee’s work life and organizational success. One of the major job attitudes is job satisfaction. The job itself may have qualities or factors that contribute to an employee’s job satisfaction or dissatisfaction; hours, pay, environment, culture, and the amount or type of work all play a role. Other factors can include the quality of social aspects of the workplace environment, such as employee relationships and support. Virtual work can have an impact on job satisfaction, as it may affect social relationships due to reduced face-to-face interaction.

In this Discussion, you will explore job attitudes at play at Walden Sports and come up with ways to measure them.

To prepare for this Discussion:

• View Introducing Walden Sports, Inc. found in this week’s media Learning Resources. Assuming the role of a consultant, identify job satisfaction problems within Walden Sports and think about data you may need to collect in order to better understand those problems.
• Read the article “Organizational Behavior: Affect in the Workplace.” Consider the production of moods and their consequences in a workplace such as Walden Sports.
• Read the article “Understanding Job Satisfaction in the Causal Attitude Network (CAN) Model.” Compare the measurement of job satisfaction models and how that can support your choice of data collection strategy. See Appendix B, the “Detailed Methods” section, on page 28.
• Review the article “Attitudes: Satisfaction, Commitment and Involvement,” focusing specifically on pages 9–17. Consider the measurement of and challenges to measuring job attitudes and job satisfaction.
• Review the article “Job Attitudes, Job Satisfaction, and Job Affect: A Century of Continuity and Change.” Focus on the varying methods of measurement and data collection presented.
• Read the article “Exploring Different Forms of Job (Dis)satisfaction and Their Relationship With Well-Being, Motivation, and Performance.” Review qualitative and quantitative methods presented.

By Day 3

Post a response to the following: Provide an explanation of two problems related to job satisfaction expressed by the Walden Sports CEO. Explain which data you might need to collect in order to better understand the problems at Walden Sports. Finally, describe two specific strategies that you might use to collect these data and explain why you might use these strategies.

Resources:

Brief, A. P., & Weiss, H. M. (2002). Organizational behavior: Affect in the workplace. Annual Review of Psychology, 53(1), 279–307. https://doi-org.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/10.1146/ann…

Carter, N. T., Lowery, M. R., Williamson Smith, R., Conley, K. M., Harris, A. M., Listyg, B., Maupin, C. K., King, R. T., & Carter, D. R. (2020). Understanding job satisfaction in the causal attitude network (CAN) model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 105(9), 959–993. https://doi-org.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/10.1037/apl…

Crede, M. (2018). Attitudes: Satisfaction, commitment and involvement. In D. S. Ones, N. Anderson, C. Viswesvaran, & H. K. Sinangil (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of industrial, work & organizational psychology: Organizational psychology (2nd ed., Vol. 2, pp. 3–24). SAGE. http://dx.doi.org.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/10.4135/9…