When Satisfied Workers Lose Faith: Perceived Coworker Dissatisfaction and Organizational Attachment

• In Event: Social Psychology Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

Personal job satisfaction drives organizational attachment, but do workers' perceptions of their coworkers' satisfaction also play a role? Using survey data from 987 Canadian employees, we develop a measure of perceived coworker dissatisfaction and examine whether these beliefs shape organizational commitment and turnover intentions above and beyond personal job satisfaction. We find that workers substantially overestimate the prevalence of dissatisfaction among their coworkers. On average, respondents estimated that 41 percent of their colleagues are dissatisfied, compared to an observed personal dissatisfaction rate of 24 percent. These perceptions predict reduced organizational commitment and elevated turnover intentions, net of personal satisfaction and a comprehensive set of demographic and workplace characteristics. Critically, however, both associations depend on workers' own satisfaction levels. Two competing frameworks generate opposing predictions about which workers should be most vulnerable. The ‘social validation’ perspective predicts that dissatisfied workers should be most responsive, since perceiving shared discontent should legitimize their own negative assessments, justifying withdrawal. By contrast, the ‘information diagnosticity’ perspective predicts that collective discontent represents discrepant information for job satisfied workers, which should encourage them to downwardly reassess their organizational attachment. For organizational commitment, we find evidence that both mechanisms operate across different regions of the perceived dissatisfaction distribution, though the pattern more strongly favors information diagnosticity: satisfied workers respond earlier and more sharply to perceived coworker dissatisfaction. For turnover intentions, results unambiguously support the diagnosticity perspective: highly satisfied workers' probability of intending to leave nearly doubles across the observed range of perceived coworker dissatisfaction, while dissatisfied workers show no significant change. These findings reveal that the workers organizations are least worried about losing—those who are personally satisfied—are the most vulnerable to social information about colleagues' experiences.

Authors

• Paul Glavin, McMaster University

• Scott Schieman, University of Toronto

• Alexander Wilson, University of Toronto