A Comparison of Attitude, Personality, and Knowledge Predictors of Service-Oriented Essay

The research design that was used in this study was correlational non-experimental. The variables that were studied included confirmatory factor analysis, item-to-total correlations, improvement in the Cronbach’s alpha statistic, and attitudinal and personality antecedents. With the use of antecedents, the job satisfaction measure incorporated seven items on a variety of extrinsic and intrinsic work related aspects and one global job satisfaction item. Two studies were conducted to investigate the attitude, personality, and knowledge antecedents of service oriented OCBs. It consisted of participants, whose responsibilities included answering customer service inquiries, responding to customer problems, and selling and recommending services over the phone. There were 325 employees who agreed to participate in the study in exchange for 1 hour of overtime pay. With the second study, the participants included staff and part-time employees of five libraries at a university who had customer contact as part of their daily responsibilities. They represented several departments that have customer contact including circulation, document reserves, and government publications. The relationships proposed were that job satisfaction would be positively related to the service-oriented OCBs of loyalty, service delivery, and participation. Also it expects POS to be positively related to contact-employee loyalty, service delivery, and participation OCBs. They also expected the following: a positive relationship between service orientation and loyalty, no relationship is expected between empathy and loyalty OCBs, the trait richness will be positively related to contact employee loyalty, service delivery, and participation OCBs, and lastly that strategy richness will be positively related to contact employee loyalty, service delivery, and participation OCBs. The study concluded that the results in both studies were virtually identical. The hypotheses in this study were proven after the information was gathered and evaluated. There are no recommendations that I would change within this study, however, I would have applied the study to other employee types. The Influence of Motivation to Attend, Ability to Attend, and Organizational Commitment on Different Types of Absence Behaviors Journal of Managerial Issues James P. Burton, Thomas W. Lee, Brooks C. Holtom This study used the experimental design to conduct data. There were three types of variables that were used in this study which included independent, dependent, and controlled. The dependent variable was a time lost measure of absence that was used where the total number of days absent per employee was observed for a period of ten months following the administration of the survey that was used on 214 employees. The independent variable was the motivation to attend work which was measured by three items that assessed the degree to which an employee is motivated to go to work every day. Also the ability to attend was measured by four items along with organizational commitment which was measured by the items from Meyer and Allen’s. The controlled variables were age, gender, tenure, and level of education. There were five hypotheses that were proposed: 1) Ability to attend will be positively related to the frequency of absenteeism that is attributed to family issues, 2) Ability to attend will be positively related to the frequency of absenteeism that is attributed to transportation problems, 3a) Motivation to attend will be negatively related to the frequency of absenteeism that is attributed to illness, 3b) Ability to attend will be positively related to the frequency of absenteeism that is attributed to illness, 4) Motivation to attend will be negatively related to the frequency of absenteeism that results in failure to notify the organization, and 5) Motivation to attend will mediate the relationship between affective, normative, and continuance commitment and absenteeism. Hypothesis 1 was proven to be accurate, hypothesis 2 and 4 failed to gain significant R2 when the various absenteeism variables were regressed onto motivation to attend and ability to attend. Hypothesis 3a was supported after data was conducted, and Hypothesis 5 could not be conducted because motivation to attend was not significantly related to overall absenteeism. I was unable to find any flaws with this study and do not have any recommendations to change.