When people speak of employee attitudes, they usually mean job satisfaction, a positive feeling about a job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics. A person with high job satisfaction holds positive feelings about the work, while a person with low satisfaction holds negative feelings. OB researchers give job satisfaction high importance.

Related to job satisfaction is job involvement, the degree to which people identify psychologically with their jobs and consider their perceived performance levels important to their self-worth. Employees with high job involvement strongly identify with and care about the kind of work they do. Another closely related concept is psychological empowerment, or employees’ beliefs in the degree to which they influence their work environment, their competencies, the meaningfulness of their job, and their autonomy.

Research suggests that psychological empowerment strongly predicts job attitudes, while it moderately predicts performance behaviors.