Tag Archives: T.A. Judge

The Relationship Between Weight and Salary: Bad News For All Kinds of People

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Topic: Fairness, Gender, Selection
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (JAN 2011)
Article: When It Comes to Pay, Do the Thin Win? The Effect of Weight on Pay for Men and Women
Authors: T.A. Judge, D.M. Cable
Reviewed By: Ben Sher

Does career success have anything to do with what you look like?  According to a recent study by Judge and Cable (2011), the answer is yes. 

From the same people who explained that height may influence salary (Judge & Cable, 2004), now it seems weight can also influence salary.  Drawing from cultivation theory, or the idea that people are slowly drawn to accept social norms promoted by the media, they say it literally pays to be the “ideal” weight. 

So what exactly is the “ideal” weight?  Not surprisingly, the answer is different for men and women.  The authors say underweight men are actually punished with smaller salaries, presumably because they have violated gender-role norms by being too skinny.  Men are paid more with increased weight, up to the point of obesity, when salaries start to gradually decline.  For women, a very different pattern emerged.  Underweight women had the highest salaries, and salaries decreased with additional weight gain. 

But not all weight gain is equal.  In one study, the salary decrease between average versus underweight women was twice the decrease between average weight women and overweight women.  According to the researchers, this is because the media has long been portraying increasingly thinner women as being ideally attractive, and the workplace has discriminated accordingly.  Once women violate this ideal and become average weight, they may already be seen as “letting themselves go” so any further weight gain isn’t as detrimental.  

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Are Higher Paying Jobs More Satisfying?

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Topic: Employee Satisfaction, Job Attitudes
Publication: Journal of Vocational Behavior (OCT 2010)
Article: The relationship between pay and job satisfaction: A meta-analysis of the literature
Authors: T.A. Judge, R.F. Piccolo, N.P. Podsakoff, J.C. Shaw, and B.L. Rich
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger

We all want a job that pays well, right?  How many of us think things like “if I could only make that much more, I would be happy”?  Tempting to think such things isn’t it?  These questions, of course, address the old debate of whether pay leads to satisfaction.  We’ve all heard anecdotes about people who make lots of money and are miserable yet many of us can’t help but think that more money would make us more satisfied.

In an extensive meta-analysis, Judge et al. recently put this issue to the test to find out if employees find higher paying jobs more satisfying.  While their results suggest that within organizations, higher pay is associated with higher job satisfaction, the relationship was not very strong.  Not surprisingly, the results also suggest that pay level is more strongly related to employees’ satisfaction with pay specifically than with the job overall.  Moreover, the fairly weak relationships between pay level and satisfaction were consistent across several countries (U.S., Great Britain, India, Australia, Taiwan).

Judge et al.’s study suggests that while increased pay is associated with increased satisfaction with one’s pay and job, these relationships are not as strong as we might assume.  If employees truly want satisfying work, then searching for the best paying job is probably not the way to go.

The authors note that attractive characteristics of the leaders and the actual job are likely better predictors of job satisfaction than pay level.

While these results also suggest that increasing pay alone is probably not the best way to improve employees’ attitudes, Judge et al. warn that this does not mean that pay does not have any motivational power.  Nevertheless, being a pay leader in the industry is unlikely to boost organization-wide satisfaction as employees are well known to compare themselves to others and there is evidence that pay is satisfying only to the extent that it is higher than comparable others (e.g., coworkers).

Judge, T.A., Piccolo, R.F., Podsakoff, N.P., Shaw, J.C., & Rich, B.L. (2010). The relationship between pay and job satisfaction: A meta-analysis of the literature. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 77, 157-167.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Stress at Work

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Topic: Citizenship Behavior, Counterproductive Work Behaviors
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (NOV 2009)
Article: Can “good” stressors spark “bad” behaviors? The mediating role of emotions in links of challenge and hindrance stressors with citizenship and counter productive behaviors
Authors: J.B. Rodell, T.A. Judge
Reviewed By: Katie Bachman

Research suggests that stress can come from good or bad sources (Cavanaugh, Boswell, Roehling, & Boudreau, 2000).

Challenge Stressors can serve as opportunities for growth, for example:  you can be stressed because of job complexity (“now, WHAT am I supposed to do?”), workload (“I’ve got too much to do!”), and deadlines (Yikes!  It’s due tomorrow!”).

Hindrance Stressors, on the other hand, can be caused by stress because of bureaucracy (“Just let me do my job”), role ambiguity (“Whose job is this, anyway”), and hassles (“Like I said, just let me do my job!).

While both can lead to negative outcomes like emotional exhaustion, challenge stressors have been linked to positive outcomes such as job satisfaction. Hindrance stressors, on the other hand, are pretty much all bad, being linked to withdrawal behaviors and turnover.

Knowing that stress exists in these different forms is well and good, but what’s more interesting is looking at how those stressors affect voluntary behavior on the job. While we can assume that good stressors (challenge) lead to good behaviors (i.e. citizenship behaviors) and bad stressors (hindrance) lead to bad behaviors (i.e. counterproductive behaviors), it appears that good stressors can also lead to bad behaviors. How, you ask? It seems that emotions come into play and mediate the relationship between stress and behavior.

In this study, challenge stressors were linked to two emotions: attentiveness and anxiety. Both were linked to citizenship behaviors; however, anxiety was also linked to counterproductive behaviors. Yikes! Here we’re seeing a good stressor with a bad outcome. Hindrance stressors were also linked to emotions, anger and anxiety, but in that case the outcome was only counterproductive behavior. So, although bad begets bad, good can beget good or bad. For organizations, this can have some important consequences. Although you want your workers to feel challenged in their work, you don’t want them to be so challenged that their resulting anxiety leads to behaviors that undermine the organization. And the more clearly you can remove those hindrances, the better off everyone – and the organization – will be.

Rodell, J. B., & Judge, T. A. (2009). Can “good” stressors spark “bad” behaviors?
The mediating role of emotions in links of challenge and hindrance stressors with citizenship and  counterproductive behaviors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94,1438-1451.