Job attitude

A job attitude is a set of evaluations of one's job that constitute one's feelings toward, beliefs about, and attachment to one's job. Overall job attitude can be conceptualized in two ways. Either as affective job satisfaction that constitutes a general or global subjective feeling about a job, or as a composite of objective cognitive assessments of specific job facets, such as pay, conditions, opportunities and other aspects of a particular job. Employees evaluate their advancement opportunities by observing their job, their occupation, and their employer.

Research demonstrates that interrelationships and complexities underlie what would seem to be the simply defined term job attitudes. The long history of research into job attitudes suggests there is no commonly agreed upon definition. There are both cognitive and affective aspects, which need not be in correspondence with each other. Job attitude should also not be confused with the broader term attitude, because attitude is defined as a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor, whereas job attitude is a particular instance as an entity. In the definition above, the term "job" involves one's current position, one's work or one's occupation, and one's employer as its entity. However, one's attitude towards his/her work does not necessarily have to be equal with one's attitudes towards his/her employer, and these two factors often diverge.

Global job attitudes are attitudes developed towards a job through the organization, working environment, affective disposition, aggregate measures of job characteristics and the social environment. They depend on the broad totality of work conditions. In fact, job attitudes are also closely associated with more global measures of life satisfaction. Scales such as "Faces" enable researchers to interpret overall satisfaction with work. The Job in General scale focuses on the cognitive perspective (rather than applied) of the effects of job attitudes. A variety of job attributes are associated with different levels of satisfaction within global job attitudes.

Affective job satisfaction is a singular construct comprising an overall emotional feeling about a job as a whole or in general. Affective job satisfaction is measured with items addressing the extent to which individuals subjectively and emotively like their job overall, not a composite of how individuals cognitively assess two or more specific aspects of their job. The 4-item Brief Index of Affective Job Satisfaction has been developed to produce a purely affective as opposed to cognitive measure of overall affective job satisfaction.

Job facet satisfaction refers to feelings about specific job aspects, such as salary, benefits, and relationships with co-workers.

Interpersonal conflict affects job attitudes: cut-throat competition resulted in a bitter relationship with co-workers. The exacerbated stress leads to emotional exhaustion, and this negatively affects job attitude.

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