6113 CH 6 Ss 17

Eng Mgt 6113
Advanced Personnel Management

(Strategic Human Resource Management & Measurement)
Employee Attitudes & Engagement

David G. Spurlock, Ph.D., Instructor
Attitudes, Outcomes, & Relations: Satisfaction,
Commitment, Engagement, Financial impacts
Fortunes 100 Best Companies to Work For
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/best-
companies/
These companies have employee attitudes that are
generally higher than other firms and they also have higher
levels of financial performance as firms
Firms on this list tend to receive double the number of
applications as those who arent and have half the turnover
rates of those who arent
emgt6113ch6 2
Key ideas of this chapter are that
(1) employee attitudes and related attitude-
driven behaviors matter to organizational
performance
(2) measurement & analysis of those attitudes &
behaviors should be done properly to go beyond
simple-minded cliches about happy workers
It may seem obvious you that (1) above would be true but not
all bosses accept the premise or, if they do, some ascribe
varying degrees of importance to it thats why (2) is critical
emgt6113ch6 3
An attitude is a tendency to respond to an object
with some degree of favor or disfavor
Object can be almost anything: a person, a place, a
policy, a situation, an idea, a procedure, etc.
Attitudes usually are conceived as having three
interrelated components:
Cognitions (conscious thoughts)
Feelings (emotional reactions)
Behaviors (action tendencies what you do such as avoid,
confront, embrace, criticize, praise, etc.)
emgt6113ch6 4
Attitudes are multidimensional meaning that they have
different attributes that can & should be measured
separately and possibly with different scales or techniques
The top five influences on job satisfaction are
Job security
Benefits
Compensation/pay
Opportunities to use skills and abilities
Safe working environments
NOTE: This factors derive from a study quoted in your text and many other studies
find comparable kinds of factors BUT it is sometimes useful to distinguish between
job DISsatisfaction and job SATisfaction as there are influential models that show
those two are affected by different factors and are not simply the opposite ends of
the same dimension
emgt6113ch6 5
Employee Engagement is associated with feelings of
energy, enthusiasm, & a positive affective state
Engagement implies the activation of employee
energies toward work
Engagement is characterized by vigor, dedication, & absorption
Job satisfaction implies an outcome state as a result of
that work
Engagement and satisfaction are usually highly
correlated but they are NOT the same thing
emgt6113ch6 6
Commitment is the bond of the individual to the
organization that inhibits voluntary separation either
from the job itself or the organization or (somewhat more
abstractly) from ones overall occupation or profession
While there is an expectation that satisfaction and
commitment would be correlated (and they are), it is
possible to be committed to ones job without feeling a
commitment to the organization (or vice versa)
Usually in HR measurement contexts, we use commitment
as a concept associated with decisions to stay with the
organization or go (e.g., turnover)
emgt6113ch6 7
Commitment is related to satisfaction & engagement
but, again, it is usually regarded as a distinct concept
Satisfaction often can be split between the work itself, the job
(i.e., the defined set of roles, duties, responsibilities, privileges,
etc.), and the organizational units to which one belongs
Engagement tends to be associated primarily with the work
itself
Commitment is usually to the job or the organization or both
even though in some cases one can be committed to seeing some
type of work get done regardless of the particular job or
organization doing it
emgt6113ch6 8
2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce results are
given on pp. 145-146
Six dimensions of effective workplaces:
Job challenge/learning
Autonomy
Supervisor task support
Climate of respect and trust
Work-life fit
Economic security
An overall index of all 6 dimensions was correlated with

each of the 3 outcomes of satisfaction, engagement, &
commitment but the individual relations varied
emgt6113ch6 9
A note about R2
This is symbol for the squared multiple correlation (technically the
coefficient of multiple determination) of a set of several predictor
variables with a criterion variable the matrix formula for which can be
found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_correlation
The interpretation of R2 = .466 on p. 145 is that 46.6% of the variance
in job satisfaction is explained by the index representing all 6 predictors
in a multiple regression equation
In general, a correlation value with just two variables, when
squared, is called the coefficient of determination, r2, and it
gives how much of the variation in one variable can be explained
by the other so in the case of just two variables with r=0.3, the
variance explained is only 9%
emgt6113ch6 10
Fig 6-1 shows (presumed) impact of employee attitude-
driven behaviors on financial performance
Impacts of attitudes on specific behaviors matter more in
some jobs and businesses than in others
Customer interactions may be heavily affected by employee
attitudes
Teamwork and cooperation may be affected by citizenship
behaviors which are in turn heavily influenced by attitudes
Absenteeism & turnover are more important in some jobs than
others as weve already discussed but, if they matter greatly, are
likely to be managed by managing employee attitudes
emgt6113ch6 11
Some firms use employee attitudes as a proxy for other
important intangible variables that may be hard to
measure directly like individual growth & well-being,
organizational adaptability, and goodwill
Fig. 6-2 shows implications of employee engagement
for competitive advantage taking into account some of
the level of organization aggregation points made in the
text on p. 148
emgt6113ch6 12
Fig. 6-3 depicts relations of employee engagement and
service climate in heavily customer service oriented
environments such as restaurants
Customer loyalty is extremely important to these type of
businesses because loyal customers (1) recommend the
business to others and (2) generate repeat business
These businesses are often in very competitive environments
where small differences in performance can make or break the
business
In todays world of online reviews and recommendations (Yelp,
Facebook, etc.), even a few bad customer experiences, when
widely publicized, can be detrimental
emgt6113ch6 13
Final comments before we talk about measures & analytics
Note that not all effects are additive Fig. 6-3 shows
an example where the relation of employee engagement
and organizational resources are (loosely speaking)
multiplicative because low or zero values on one variable
cant easily be compensated for with higher values on the
other, unlike with additive relations
Evidence presented suggests engagement etc, causes
higher financial performance of firms but if only
correlational data available, then direction of causation is in
doubt
emgt6113ch6 14
Measures & analytics for attitudes & related
concepts
Measurement of attitudes is very well-developed
in the literature but most practicing managers are
ignorant of many basic concepts and dont choose
appropriate tools & techniques
Sometimes overall, global measures (one item
usually) are sufficient for getting a sense of overall
satisfaction but to diagnose underlying causes of
attitudes and their particular effects on particular
behaviors, measuring individual facets of job-
related attitudes (e.g., pay, coworkers) is much
more useful
emgt6113ch6 15
Measures & analytics for attitudes & related
concepts
Example of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale
on p. 152
Note that all 9 items form essentially one uniform
scale (they seem to measure the same one thing due
to the high intercorrelation of > 0.8) as opposed to
have several subscales measuring distinct things as
you would if three subsets of three items each were
highly intercorrelated but the items from different
subscales were much less correlated with one
another
emgt6113ch6 16
Time Lags, Levels of Analysis, & Causal
Ordering
Time lags between measurements of variables can
complicate interpretations of the variable relations
Issue is stability of variable values which must be
sufficient to justify prediction
Text gives examples of correlations of variables
measured at 1,2,3,4 year lags
Note time series measurements are a specialized area of
statistics that economists and financial researchers use often;
organizational researchers do longitudinal (across time) studies
but typically dont have the kind of long, dense time series data
that economists have
emgt6113ch6 17
Ordering
Conducting analyses at the level of the organizational
unit or the entire organization is justifiable based upon
the demonstrated relations between aggregated attitude
data and organizational unit performance discussed in text
even when correlation of individual attitudes with individual
behavior isnt particularly high
Aside on a fine point of attitude measurement:
In general it is better to match general attitudes to general
behaviors and specific attitudes to specific behaviors: mixing
general variables with specific ones isnt likely to lead to valid
insights
emgt6113ch6 18
Ordering
It is generally assumed that employee attitudes cause
organizational performance effects and certainly data do
support that assumption
However, important to recognize that reciprocal
causality can operate where there are feedback and
feed-forward mechanisms even if they are crude or
intermittent
In addition, reciprocal causality can occur even without
explicit loops when independent cause-effect links
operate in both directions at different times
emgt6113ch6 19
Behavior Costing Approach & Value-Profit
Chain
Behavior-Costing approach assumes that
attitudinal indexes of employee satisfaction &
engagement will predict work behaviors like
absenteeism & turnover (participation membership)
as well as work strategies that determine how
employees behave when on the job
Relevant behaviors on the job can be measured with
cost-accounting techniques
emgt6113ch6 20
Chain
Text illustrates principles of behavior costing with
example using a somewhat more elaborate model
of a value-profit chain from SYSCO, a food
marketing & distribution firm
See Fig. 6-4 for overall logic and Table 6-2 for
examples of attitude scale items
emgt6113ch6 21
Chain
SYSCOs web portal for managers in its 147
operating companies to share best practices with
each other
Each company assessed on a balanced scorecard
consisting of 4 areas: financial, operational, human
capital, & customer performance
In the human capital area, SYSCO uses several
metrics including:
Work climate/employee engagement survey
Productivity
Employee retention
emgt6113ch6 22
Chain
Table 6-3 shows relations among employee
(associate) satisfaction and other important
scorecard metrics
Differences on variables arent huge and may not be
statistically significant in some instances but the
general relation seems clear
Problem inferring causality though as always
emgt6113ch6 23
Chain
A cost-savings analysis for two specific employee
groups (marketing associates and drivers) is shown
on pp. 161-162
Integrating these attitude analyses into the
overall organization occurred when executives
recognized the importance of the (lagged) R2 (0.46)
between 3 employee related variables (the
predictors) and pre-tax earnings (the criterion)
Thus the value-profit chain depicted in Fig. 6-4
was validated and adopted
emgt6113ch6 24
Chain
Table 6-4 summarizes some key points
associated with attitude-cost models
As is the case with most organizational process
improvement programs and methods, ongoing
research and practice serve to clarify pros and cons
of particular approaches and contribute to better
implementations
emgt6113ch6 25
END OF SLIDE SET
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Eng Mgt 6113

Advanced Personnel Management

Employee Attitudes & Engagement

An overall index of all 6 dimensions was correlated with

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