North American Employee Attitudes in the 1900's: Changing Attitudes for Changing Times

During the decade of the 1990's, numerous changes have occurred in the North American industrial sector with seven million Americans having lost their jobs since 1987 (Cascio, 1995) while numerous commercial areas expanded their employee base. Employer-employee relationships have become re-defined as industry strives to compete in a global market. The workplace has become decentralized with more responsibility shifted to the manufacturing floor and support groups to determine their needs and effectiveness. As organizations are flattened with broad span of control, difficulties have increased in communicating with, motivating, and rewarding employees. To meet productivity goals, organizations must create environments which facilitate positive outcomes. Key to these environments are high quality leader-member exchanges, which are central to productivity and satisfaction in the workplace. These exchanges depend heavily upon a long-term relationship between a subordinate and immediate superior, coupled with similarity in demographics for the two individuals (Graen & Scandura, 1987). In today's organization, those conditions are increasingly unlikely as workers frequently shift employment both within and between organizations. Such organizational shifts are not unique to the United States as world-wide personnel practices change as well. Notable shifts are decline in wages based upon seniority in Japan (Mroczkowski & Hanaoka, 1989), decline in job security and increased performance demands in England (Herriot & Pemberton, 1995) and increased higher education training and apprenticeships as a result of higher unemployment in Germany (Roberts, Clark, & Wallace, 1994). The subjective reactions of hourly and salaried work forces to these changes reflect some departures from traditional concerns of past decades. The present study examined patterns of these attitudes in North American workers throughout the 1990's. Method Subjects Data were drawn from survey results obtained on 9,495 employees from 45 manufacturing facilities from throughout North America (39 in the United States and six in Canada) between 1992 and 1998. Data were comprised of salaried and hourly work forces, ranging from new hires to 30+ years of seniority. No temporary employee data were included. Additional structured interview data were extracted from 25 organizational leaders of Fortune 500 companies to compliment the survey data drawn from the aforementioned pool. Survey Instruments The form of the employee survey instrument was a of format in which employees were given a statement (e.g. There is good communication from the highest levels of this organization down to all employees) and asked to rate their level of agreement on a 5-choice scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Approximately 10% of the items were phrased negatively to control for response set and/or responding without reading an item. These negatively phrased items were statistically transformed to make them consistent with other items for purposes of reporting. Although survey item reading level was fixed at 6th grade, literacy issues resulted in approximately 250 subjects to whom the surveys were read out-loud. While a fixed core of items were structured in each survey, total number of items varied from survey to survey to accommodate the needs of individual organizations to gather information on additional issues uniquely germane to their settings. Procedure Between the period of 1992 and 1998, employee survey data were gathered on subjects in manufacturing settings. Participation was voluntary and varied from a low of 72% to a high of 94% in the 45 facilities. All survey information was gathered on-site with third party administrators conducting the survey process to reduce employee suspicion of the survey process and to guarantee that individuals would remain anonymous. …

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