5.3 Primary organisational outcomes: employee attitudes
Both employee attitudes and job performance are described by Ambrose and
Kulik’s (1999: 232) as ways of measuring work motivation. Job satisfaction,
affective organisational commitment and work meaning have been identified from
the generic and applied hospitality literatures as employee attitudes that are
relevant to the hospitality context.
Job Satisfaction
Jex and Britt (2008: 131) describe how job satisfaction can be defined as an
individual’s overall evaluation of their job (e.g. Locke 1976; Spector 1997) or as
an employee’s attitude toward his or her job (e.g. Eagly and Chaiken 1993).
Huelsman (2007) echoes Jex and Britt in noting that as an attitude, job
satisfaction can be separated into affective (emotional), cognitive (belief) and
behavioural (job-related behaviours and behavioural tendencies) dimensions.
Elsewhere, however, Weiss (2002) defines job satisfaction as ‘...a positive (or
negative) evaluative judgment one makes about one’s job or job situation’. Weiss
goes on to argue that what is being measured by job satisfaction measurement
scales is in fact ‘evaluation’ rather than ‘affect’, based on the ephemeral nature of
affect in contrast with evaluative judgements which can be rather less transitory.
Whether defined as evaluation or as affect, the relationships between job
satisfaction and its antecedents and consequences are not always straightforward
(Byrne and Neuman 1992: 46-47). A significant volume of job satisfaction
research has sought to identify and evaluate a causal relationship between job
satisfaction and job performance but the identification of this ‘holy grail’
relationship has not been forthcoming (Landy 1985: 410) or, at best, weak
(Iaffaldano and Muchinsky 1985). Byrne and Neuman (1992: 46-47) go on to
cite a number of studies that suggest it is performance which predicts satisfaction
rather than the other way around.
During the course of the literature reviews for this research, seventeen
hospitality-related research studies have been identified where job satisfaction
has been incorporated as a variable of interest (Hawkins and Lee 1990;
Borchgrevink and Boster 1994; Ross and Boles 1994; Susskind et al. 2000a;
Susskind et al. 2000b; Carbery et al. 2003; Testa 2004; Kim et al. 2005; Tutuncu