The four employees’ attitudes and levels of job satisfaction differ due to diverse working positions, personal characteristics, life situations, social life, and other factors that could influence their working environment. The first employee, who is a marketing product manager, is working in a stressful environment where the supervisor forces the worker to go against her moral principles and beliefs. Therefore, this worker’s attitude towards her working position and job is rather unencouraged and negative. Although she likes the company, her job satisfaction level is low due to the requirements of her boss.
The second employee is an engineer whose function is one of the most important in the organization; however, it is a demanding job with a heavy workload that not everyone can bear. In this case, the attitude to the performed functions is positive, and the employee even likes his job despite the aspect of the heavy workload. Hence, this factor decreases the employee’s job satisfaction levels and encourages him to look for new working positions outside the company.
The third employee is a loading dock manager who often has night shifts that are usually considered to be hard working conditions. Although the functions are performed quite well by the worker, her attitude towards the company and her position leads to global dissatisfaction within the organization. This employee shares a rather negative opinion about the difficult working conditions causing occupational discontent and decreasing other employees’ attitudes towards both their position and the company. Her job satisfaction level is quite low because of inappropriate working conditions, according to her claims.
The last examined employee is a distribution lead who is a sole Hispanic representative and feels socially isolated due to the lack of social contact and the company’s attitudes towards him. Although the company promotes itself as a diverse organization, the worker is considered to be only a placeholder and is not treated seriously, which makes him doubt the company’s values, goals, and real intentions. This lack of support from both colleagues and top management or the company itself leads to low job satisfaction, negative attitudes towards the performed functions, and the inability to successfully complete the assigned tasks. As mentioned earlier, employees respond to dissatisfaction in different ways, such as lower effectiveness, negative feedback about the company, or even a planned resignation.
Such attitudes shown by the employees might negatively impact organizational culture and environment and lead to losses in profit, lower employee turnover, and overall job satisfaction. Some of the attitudes, for example, the ones shown by employees one and four, lead to a decrease in the effectiveness of their working outcomes and result in the possible loss in profit and lower public image for the organization as both show lower quality of the final products of their job. The other two examined employees tend to perform their functions correctly and without mistakes or low-quality outcomes. However, their dissatisfaction results in discouraging others which leads to unwanted levels of employee turnover and considerably decreases job satisfaction levels and working attitudes among other employees.
Therefore, these four employees show low job dissatisfaction levels that could result in huge losses for the company, and therefore, such negative attitudes need to be reduced. According to Frempong et al. (2018), job satisfaction is an integral factor in the enhancement of employees’ lives that can lead to loyalty, commitment, and punctuality and can help reduce unwanted employee turnover. Moreover, job satisfaction fully depends on emotional feelings, affections, and cognitive feelings about the job that generally influence productivity, organizational profit, and individual performance of employees (Frempong et al., 2018). Hence, the job satisfaction of employees defines the company’s well-being and requires it to be controlled and changed to a positive attitude.
Employees’ attitudes and job satisfaction levels can be changed in diverse ways, both general and individual. Several ways, such as increasing salary, appropriate reward, and recognition, are considered to be general ways of solving the problem of dissatisfaction and encouraging workers to perform their functions better. Other ways, such as mindfulness-based strength practices (MBSP), are quite effective in increasing job satisfaction, task performance, and well-being (Pang & Ruch, 2019). However, in the cases of the examined four employees, both general and individual approaches might be utilized. For instance, the first employee should be transferred to another position with another supervisor, or the problem with the discrepancies between the value statement and the actions of her supervisor need to be examined and reduced.
In the second case, one more engineer or several additional specialists can be hired to lower the workload of the existing personnel. Here, the manager should play a decisional role as a resource allocator to examine the lack of personnel resources and reduce it. This decision will help the company encourage engineers to perform their functions better, care for its employees’ health, and increase job satisfaction. The situation with the loading dock manager can be solved through a personal discussion about her complaints about the working conditions. Perhaps, in this case, higher rewards are simply wanted from her side. However, the problem with the Hispanic worker needs to be solved. Maybe, this employee gains a large potential that needs to be discovered; hence, to find out whether he can make a recognized difference, the company should provide him with all the necessary conditions. The manager should perform Mintzberg’s interpersonal role of a leader in this case. The most important factor here is the establishment of appropriate social contacts between the worker, his boss, and his colleagues. This method will bring the worker a sense of recognition and respect, which is quite important for the emotional well-being of employees.
References
Frempong, N., Agbenyo, W., & Darko, P. A. (2018). The impact of job satisfaction on employees’ loyalty and commitment: A comparative study among some selected sectors in Ghana. European Journal of Business Management, 10(12), 95-105.
Pang, D., & Ruch, W. (2019). Fusing character strength and mindfulness interventions: Benefits for job satisfaction and performance. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 24(1), 150-162. Web.