Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Psychology

Advisor

Charles Scherbaum

Committee Members

Yochi Cohen-Charash

Loren Naidoo

Harold Goldstein

Erin Eatough

Subject Categories

Industrial and Organizational Psychology

Keywords

Implicit Association Test, implicit attitudes, job satisfaction

Abstract

Implicit attitude measures have become increasingly popular over the last two decades due to their ability to circumvent a number of the limitations of explicit measures and predictive validity evidence for certain behaviors that is superior to explicit measures. However, a number of improvements have been suggested, including personalizing the implicit measure to better capture the participant’s attitude, not their general evaluation of constructs involved. This paper examined implicit job satisfaction with a modified version of a pre-established measure (IAT; Boyd, 2010), proposed a new personalized measure (P-IAT), and examined the relationships of these measures with organizationally-relevant attitudes and behaviors, within a sample of customer service employees. The IAT was found to significantly correlate with the P-IAT, explicit job satisfaction, job involvement, and counterproductive work behaviors. Correlations between the IAT and both organizational citizenship behaviors and counterproductive work behaviors were enhanced when the respondent was asked to provide ratings from someone else’s perspective, instead of their own. This modification attempted to examine a more psychologically distant construct, for which implicit measures should be more strongly related than explicit. The P-IAT was only significantly related to the IAT and voluntary absence. The relationship between the IAT and explicit job satisfaction was moderated by time-related metrics (years of work experience, months in current role, and age). There was a positive correlation between the IAT and explicit job satisfaction amongst participants with lower time metrics, but amongst participants with higher time metrics, there was no relationship.

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