Managers should be interested in their employees’ attitudes because they influence behavior in the following ways:

1. Satisfied and committed employees have lower rates of turnover and absenteeism. If managers want to keep resignations and absences down—-especially among their more productive employees—they’ll want to do things that generate positive job attitudes.

2. Whether satisfied workers are productive workers is a debate that’s been going on for almost 80 years. After the Hawthorne studies (see p. 33 in the Management History Module), managers believed that happy workers were productive workers. Because it’s not easy to determine whether job satisfaction “caused” job productivity or vice versa, some management researchers felt that the belief was generally wrong. However, we can say with some certainty that the correlation between satisfaction and productivity is fairly strong.18 Satisfied employees do perform better on the job. So managers should focus on those factors that have been shown to be conducive to high levels of employee job satisfaction: making work challenging and interesting, providing equitable rewards, and creating supportive working conditions and supportive colleagues.19 These factors are likely to help employees be more productive.

3. Managers should also survey employees about their attitudes. As one study put it, “A sound measurement of overall job attitude is one of the most useful pieces of information an organization can have about its employees.”20 However, research has also shown that attitude surveys can be more effective at pinpointing employee dissatisfaction if done multiple times rather than just at one point in time.21

4. Managers should know that employees will try to reduce dissonance. If employees are required to do things that appear inconsistent to them or that are at odds with their attitudes, managers should remember that pressure to reduce the dissonance is not as strong when the employee perceives that the dissonance is externally imposed and uncontrollable. It’s also decreased if rewards are significant enough to offset the dissonance. So the manager might point to external forces such as competitors, customers, or other factors when explaining the need to perform some work that the individual may have some dissonance about. Or the manager can provide rewards that an individual desires.