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Asking about well‐being gets you half an answer: Intra‐individual processes of implicit and explicit job attitudes
Author(s) -
Leavitt Keith,
Fong Christina T.,
Greenwald Anthony G.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal of organizational behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.938
H-Index - 177
eISSN - 1099-1379
pISSN - 0894-3796
DOI - 10.1002/job.746
Subject(s) - psychology , social psychology , impression management , implicit attitude , organizational citizenship behavior , perspective (graphical) , job performance , supervisor , cognition , job attitude , cognitive psychology , job satisfaction , organizational commitment , computer science , management , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , economics
Job attitudes, as indicators of well‐being, vary within individuals across cognitive processes and not just time. Research on employee well‐being has relied primarily on self‐reported measures of explicit job and life attitudes. Our work takes a different perspective on this issue by examining the role of implicit attitudes regarding one's organization, coworkers, and supervisor as indicators of well‐being. Implicit attitudes are automatic, introspectively inaccessible, and predict behavior in socially sensitive contexts in which self‐report measures may be impaired by impression management. The results of a field study demonstrate that implicit and explicit job attitudes reflect relatively independent intra‐individual processes. Additionally, this study demonstrates that job performance and citizenship behaviors are best predicted by a combination of implicit and explicit job attitudes, and that a dissociation between implicit and explicit attitudes impacts organizational identification. We conclude with a discussion of how capturing implicit cognition in the workplace can better describe and subsequently help improve employee well‐being. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.