ABSTRACT
The research area known as job attitudes in the scientific field of organizational behavior and human resource management (OB/HR) focuses primarily on four constructs: job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job involvement, and work engagement. In the current chapter, we (a) define these four concepts, (b) discuss the extreme popularity and trends in the popularity of these concepts, (c) identify the currently most-used measures of each concept, (d) review empirical redundancy among these concepts, which has been interpreted to imply a general “A-factor” of job attitudes, (e) summarize the central role of job attitudes in predicting work behavior, (f) review the origins of job attitudes in terms of job characteristics, personality/dispositions, leadership, and social exchange, and (g) discuss more recent attempts to study attitudes at different levels of analysis, including both group-level and within-person variation in job attitudes.
