ABSTRACT
More than thirty years ago, Dennis Organ laid the foundation for what would become one of the most influential streams of management research. In a pioneering conceptual work, Organ (1977) offered an intriguing answer to a conundrum that had baffled scholars and practitioners for decades-why is the relationship between employees’ attitudes and performance weaker than conventional wisdom might predict? Intuitively, it would seem that happy workers should be more productive. Yet the research evidence suggested a rather modest positive correlation between employees’ affective liking for the job (i.e., job satisfaction) and performance (see Brayfield and Crockett 1955; and Iaffaldano and Muchinsky 1985, for meta-analyses of the satisfactionperformance relationship).
