The Impact of a Lasting Economic Crisis on Employee Attitudes: A Follow-up and Extension

• Main Authors: Yannis Markovits, Diana Boer, Sibylle Gerbers, Rolf van Dick
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Athens Institute for Education and Research 2017-04-01
• Series: Athens Journal of Business & Economics
• Subjects: job satisfaction; organizational commitment; burnout; economic crisis; greece; follow-up study
• Online Access: https://www.athensjournals.gr/business/2017-3-2-1-Markovits.pdf

This paper presents a follow-up study of Markovits et al.’s (2014) comparison of large samples of Greek employees before and at the onset of the economic crisis. Now at the crisis’ peak, we again sampled data from 450 employees about their job satisfaction, organizational commitment, regulatory focus, and burnout. Overall, compared to the two samples before, employees’ job attitudes further decrease with lower normative and higher continuance commitment, lower (extrinsic and intrinsic) job satisfaction and both lower promotion and (somewhat surprisingly) even lower prevention orientation. Expanding previous studies, results show that satisfaction and commitment are also related to burnout and that those participants who are currently employed but had experienced personal unemployment during the crisis showed more negative attitudes and higher burnout.