environmental (organisational) levels. This framework can be summarised as
follows:
Organisational outcomes = f of psychological processes at different levels
(individual processes x interpersonal and group processes x environmental
processes).
Organisational outcomes include:
productive behaviours (job performance, organisational citizenship behaviour)
counterproductive behaviours (turnover, absenteeism)
attitudes (job satisfaction, organisational commitment)
Huelseman’s framework is problematic at the detailed level however. This is
because some variables are conceptualised in more than one way. For example:
motivation appears as a process in the overall framework (section headed
Individual Processes: Motivation) but within the Job-based approaches sub-
section (para. 2), motivation appears as a work (organisational) outcome;
secondly, Employee Attitudes are contained (alongside Productive and Counter-
Productive Organisational Behaviours) within the Organisational Outcomes
section, but then job satisfaction (one of the employee attitudes) is cited as a
causal factor for job performance.
The first of these difficulties has likely arisen because motivation can be
considered both as an outcome and as a process. In the second example, the
cause of confusion may be the capacity of some of variables to act as both
dependent (outcome) and independent (predictor) variables within the same
model. To exemplify this situation, Figure 4 - 2 illustrates the proposed
relationships described in Patiar and Mia (2009: 255) where non-financial
performance is hypothesised as being both a dependent variable (in relation to
transformational leadership and market competition) and an independent variable
(in relation to financial performance).
In a more generalised commentary, Millward (2005: 19-20) has noted that
difficulties such as these are inherent when trying to conceptualise, within a
coherent integrated frame, an area of study (organisational psychology) which is
recognised as being somewhat piecemeal and difficult to distil or integrate.