Investigating the employees' job attitudes in Bidboland Gas Refining Company and Providing Improvement Strategies: A Qualitative Study

Managers need to know the principles of organizational behavior. One of the basics of management in organizations is having information about employees' attitudes. Employees' attitudes can affect their performance. Considering employees' job attitudes can be of great benefit for organization, because attitudes are one of the basic predictors of behavior. Job attitude is a kind of feeling towards one's job that is result of factors such as the nature of the job, organizational, environmental, and also individual factors. The purpose of this study was to investigate qualitatively the employees’ job attitudes in Bidboland Gas Refining Company. The main and important attitudes that are addressed in the present study include job satisfaction, job involvement, organizational commitment, and perceived organizational support. Among the proposed attitudes, job involvement can act as a key attitude for the organization, because job involvement leads to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, especially emotional and normative commitment, and desire to stay in job. Job involvement also reduces absenteeism and turnover and increases positive and voluntary behaviors such as humanitarian actions.

The statistical population of the study was all managers and employees of Bidboland Gas Refining Company. 50 employees were selected by snowball method as research sample. The instrument was semi-structured interviews, and qualitative content analysis was used for data analysis.

The results showed that a total of 4 variables, 20 dimensions and 27 components were obtained for the four job attitudes. 8 dimensions and 15 components for the job satisfaction; 3 dimensions and 3 components for the organizational commitment; 5 dimensions and 5 components for the perceived organizational support, and 4 dimensions and 4 components were obtained for the job involvement variable.

Given that job attitudes affect the behaviors of employees in organizations, by recognizing job attitudes, many job events such as job burnout, apathy, various misconduct, and finally  leaving the job can be prevented. And this is very useful for managers of organizations.