Job Attitudes: A Meta-Analytic Review and the Creation of a Temporal Theoretical Framework

Abstract

Given the importance and popularity of employee job attitudes in the academic and popular press, there has been a great deal of construct and theory proliferation in the job attitudes literature. Such growth in the number of job attitudes raises concerns about the potential of construct redundancy. The present review investigated redundancy among seven common job attitudes (organizational commitment, perceived organizational support, job involvement, job satisfaction, job engagement, procedural justice, and distributive justice). Using a set of three primary studies and one meta-analytic study (147 job attitude effect sizes; total k = 6,530; total n = 3,386,552), our results suggest that true redundancy among job attitudes is not a major concern. Most relations among attitudes fall into the ??=.40 to?.60 range. Yet, the findings illustrate that some attitudes are more valuable in predicting key employee outcomes than others. For example, distributive justice explains only an additional 2% of the variance in performance above job satisfaction, the dominant job attitude predictor. We contribute to the literature on job attitudes by advancing a temporal theoretical model that represents a different way of looking at job attitudes based on the results. Individuals bracket their work experiences, which vary in lengths of time; understanding these time periods may help to identify the nuances of job attitudes. Finally, the current review also serves as a job attitudes primer with definitions, applicable theoretical frameworks, scales and items, and empirical relationships between job attitudes and key constructs provided.