Effects of Employee Attitudes:

Attitudes are reasonably good predictors of behaviors. They provide clues to an

employee’s behavioral intentions or inclinations to act in a certain way. Positive job
attitudes help predict constructive behaviors; negative job attitudes help predict
undesirable behaviors. When employees are dissatisfied with their jobs, lack job
involvement, and are low in their commitment to the organization, a wide variety of
consequences may follow. This result is especially likely if the feelings are both strong
and persistent. Dissatisfied employees may engage in psychological withdrawal, physical
withdrawal or even overt acts of aggression and retaliation for presumed wrongs. On the
other hand, satisfied employees may provide acts of customer service beyond the call of
duty have sparkling work records and actively pursue excellence in all areas of their jobs.
A large number of studies have addressed the outcomes of satisfaction and dissatisfaction
and the basic nature of the results is reported here in the areas of performance, turnover,
absences and tardiness, theft, violence and other behaviors. These are all important
outcomes that organizations are vitally concerned about controlling.

Employee Performance:

Some managers cling to an old myth that high satisfaction always leads to high employee
performance-but this assumption is not correct. Satisfied workers actually may be right,
average, or even low producers and they will tend to continue the level of performance
that previously brought them satisfaction. The satisfaction-performance relationship is
more complex than the simple path of “satisfaction leads to performance”. Alternatively,
a different scenario emerges if performance is low. Employees might not receive the
rewards they were hoping for and dissatisfaction can result. Under these circumstances,
the employee might exhibit one or more negative behaviors, such as turnover
absenteeism, tardiness, theft, violence, or poor organizational citizenship. Each of these
undesirable by-products of dissatisfaction will now be explored.
Turnover:

As might be expected, higher job satisfaction is associated with lower employee turnover,
which is the proportion of employees leaving an organization during a given time period.
The more-satisfied employees are less likely to go through a progressive process in which
they think about quitting, search for a new job and evaluate their alternatives, or
announce their intention to quit. Thus they are more likely to stay with their employer
longer. Similarly those employees who have lower satisfaction usually have higher rates
of turnover. They may lack self-fulfillment, received little reorganization on the job or
experiences continual conflict with a supervisor or peer, or they may have reached a
personal plateau in their career. As a result they are more likely to seek greener pastures
elsewhere and leave their employers, while their more satisfied associates remain.
Employee turnover can have several negative consequences especially if the turnover rate
is high. Often it is difficult to replace the departed employees and the direct and indirect
costs to the organization of replacing workers are expensive.

Absences and Tardiness:

Employees who have low job satisfaction tend to be absent more often. The connection is
not sharp for a couple of reasons. First some absences are caused by legitimate medical
reasons; therefore a satisfied employee may have a valid absence. Second, dissatisfaction
employees do not necessarily plan to be absent, but they seem to find it easier to respond
to the opportunities to do so. These voluntary absences often occur with high frequency
among a certain cluster of employees and usually occur on Monday or Fridays. Where as
involuntary absenteeism can sometimes be predicted and often be reduced through the
use of more thorough preem-polyment physical exams and work-history record checks,
different approaches are needed for absences caused by poor attitudes.
Theft:

Some employees steal products, like the pepperoni sticks described above. Others use
company services without authorization, such as when they make personal long-distance
calls at work. Others forge checks or commit other types of fraud. All these acts represent
theft, or the unauthorized removal of company resources. Although there are many causes
of employee theft, some employees may steal because they feel exploited, overworked, or
frustrated by the impersonal treatment that they receive from their organization. In their
own minds, employees may justify this unethical behavior as a way considers ill
treatment at the hands of a supervisor. In contrast to the situation with absenteeism and
tardiness, tighter organizational controls or incentive systems do not always solve theft
problems, since they are directed at the symptoms and not at the underlying causes as
severe dissatisfaction.

Violence:

One of the most extreme consequences of employee dissatisfaction is exhibited through

violence, or various for ms of verbal or physical aggression at work. Although the source
of violence can include customers and strangers, the effect is the same-millions of
workers are now the victims of workplace violence annually and many more live under
the direct or perceived threat of harm. Ironically work stress can be both a cause of
violence and the after math of it. Managers must increasingly be on the lookout for signs
that employee dissatisfaction might turn into verbal or physical harm at work and they
must appropriate preventive actions.