PSY 435 Week 4 Motivation and Job Attitudes Example

Why Installers Quit in July: Job Design, Fairness and Satisfaction at a Solar Company

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSY/435: Industrial/Organizational Psychology

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The company, staff, survey and figures are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources listed.

Hiring well and training well matter little if good employees leave. This paper examines why Desert Sun Solar lost a quarter of its new installers in the first summer, using theories of work motivation and research on job attitudes, and proposes a plan to keep them.

The Data

By August, twenty-nine of the 120 installers hired in the spring had quit. Exit interviews and a ten-question pulse survey of current installers revealed four themes. Installers on some crews did the same task, carrying and mounting rails, all day, every day. Crew leads assigned schedules with no input, often changing them the night before. Many believed a competitor paid two dollars more per hour, and no one had explained how Desert Sun set pay. And several described leads who announced decisions without reasons. Average satisfaction was lowest on crews with the highest quit rates.

Job Design and Motivation

Hackman and Oldham (1976) argued that work motivates when it uses several skills, lets someone carry a job from start to finish, clearly matters to others, gives room for judgment and shows its own results. Such jobs, they proposed, lead people to experience their work as meaningful, to feel responsible for outcomes and to know how they are doing, and those experiences drive motivation, satisfaction and quality. In a study of employees across a range of jobs, the characteristics were associated with these states and outcomes, especially for employees with strong growth needs.

Desert Sun's jobs vary sharply on these features. Installers who rotate among mounting, wiring and site preparation have skill variety. Those who see a system through to its first switch-on, and meet the homeowner, have task identity and significance. Installers assigned only to carry rails have little of any. Quit rates were highest among rail carriers.

Satisfaction and Performance

Judge et al. (2001) reviewed research on the satisfaction-performance relationship, combining over three hundred samples. After correcting for measurement error, the average correlation was about .30, a moderate relationship, stronger for complex jobs. The review challenged both the old belief that satisfied workers are always more productive and the later claim that there is no relationship at all.

At Desert Sun, satisfaction is likely to relate modestly to installation quality and more clearly to turnover, absence and safety attention. Improving satisfaction is worth doing, but it should not be expected to transform productivity on its own.

Fairness at Work

Colquitt et al. (2001) pooled a quarter century of workplace fairness studies and separated four questions employees ask: Was the result fair, such as my raise? Was the way it was decided fair? Was I treated with respect? Was it explained to me honestly? Each form predicted outcomes such as satisfaction, commitment, trust and withdrawal, and procedural justice was especially tied to attitudes toward the organization.

Installers' complaints map onto all four. Pay that seems lower than a competitor's raises distributive concerns. Schedules set the night before without input raise procedural ones. Leads who announce decisions without reasons violate informational justice. Several installers also described being yelled at on the roof, an interpersonal issue.

Two dollars an hour was only part of it; installers also wanted to know how the two dollars was decided and to hear it explained without shouting.

Goals and Expectations

Other motivation theories add to the picture. Expectancy theory holds that effort depends on whether people believe effort leads to performance, performance leads to rewards and the rewards are valued. Many installers said they saw no path from good work to higher pay, so the middle link was broken. Goal-setting research suggests that clear, challenging crew targets, such as zero callbacks in a month, with feedback on progress, can raise effort when people accept the goals and have the skills to meet them.

Measuring Attitudes Well

The pulse survey was useful but short. A fuller annual survey would use established scales for job satisfaction, commitment and perceived fairness rather than single questions, report results by crew so leads see their own patterns and guarantee anonymity so installers answer honestly. Survey results mean little unless people see changes afterward, so each crew will receive a summary and one agreed action within a month.

Commitment and Turnover

Organizational commitment, attachment to the organization, comes in forms: affective, wanting to stay; continuance, needing to stay; and normative, feeling obliged to stay. Installers in a hot labor market have little continuance commitment, since other jobs are easy to find, so affective commitment, built through meaningful work and fair treatment, is the main lever for retention.

External Factors

Not all turnover reflects the company. Summer roof temperatures in Phoenix are punishing, and some new installers discovered the work was not for them. Competitors are hiring aggressively. These factors set limits on what Desert Sun can achieve but make controllable factors more important.

The Retention Plan

Redesign jobs: rotate installers among tasks weekly and have each crew complete systems from start to switch-on, with the homeowner walk-through included.

Open the pay process: publish how pay is set, compare it with local rates and adjust where Desert Sun is below market, with clear steps for raises tied to skills certified on the job.

Involve installers in scheduling: post schedules a week ahead and let crews swap shifts within rules.

Train crew leads in fair treatment: explain decisions, invite questions and address problems privately and respectfully.

Shift the hottest work: start at 5 a.m. in summer and end rooftop work by early afternoon.

Evaluation

The plan will be tracked by monthly quit rates by crew, a quarterly satisfaction and justice survey and exit interviews. Crews adopting rotation first can be compared with those adopting it later, giving the company a fair test of whether job redesign, rather than cooler fall weather, reduced quits.

Conclusion

Desert Sun's summer turnover reflects jobs low in variety and identity, schedules decided without input, unexplained pay and leads who announce rather than explain. Research on job characteristics, the moderate satisfaction-performance link and the forms of organizational justice explains these problems and supports a plan that redesigns work, opens decisions and trains leaders, while recognizing the limits set by heat and the labor market.

References

Colquitt, J. A., Conlon, D. E., Wesson, M. J., Porter, C. O. L. H., & Ng, K. Y. (2001). Justice at the millennium: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 425-445. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.425

Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 250-279. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90016-7

Judge, T. A., Thoresen, C. J., Bono, J. E., & Patton, G. K. (2001). The job satisfaction-job performance relationship: A qualitative and quantitative review. Psychological Bulletin, 127(3), 376-407. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.127.3.376