Brief & Aldag Job Characteristics & JS

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Employeereactionstojobcharacteristics:Aconstructivereplication.ARTICLEinJOURNALOFAPPLIEDPSYCHOLOGYMARCH1975ImpactFactor:4.31DOI:10.1037/h0076548

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Journal ol Applied Psychology1975, Vol. 60, No. 2, 182-186

Employee Reactions to Job Characteristics:A Constructive Replication

Arthur P. BriefDepartment of Business Administration,

University of KentuckyRamon J. Aldag

Graduate School of Business,University of Wisconsin

Hackman and Lawler's conceptual model involving relationships between jobcharacteristics and employee affective reactions was investigated by a partialreplication. Subjects, 104 emplos'ees occupying jobs aimed at rehabilitatinginmates, completed a questionnaire involving their (a) perceptions of job coredimensions; (b) internal work motivation; (c) general job satisfaction; (d)job involvement; (e) higher order need strength; and ( f ) specific satisfactionsmeasured by Job Descriptive Index items. Significant, positive correlationswere found between job dimensions and employee reactions. While the resultswere in the direction of Hackman and Lawler's finding that higher order needstrength moderated the job characteristics-employee reaction relationship, therole of higher order need strength was found to be more complex.

Several researchers have argued that short-cycle, repetitive jobs cost an organization interms of increased job dissatisfaction, ab-senteeism and turnover, and difficulties ineffectively managing employees who perceivetheir jobs as monotonous (e.g., Blauner, 1964;Guest, 19SS; Walker, 19SO; Walker & Guest,19S2). In response to these arguments againstsimplified work, numerous students of workerbehavior have called for the vertical andhorizontal expansion of jobs (e.g., Ford,1969; Lawler, 1969; Sheppard & Herrick,1972).

Of interest to the psychologist are ques-tions concerning whether enriched jobs do, infact, affect employee motivation and, if so,how, and in particular, under what circum-stances and for what categories of workers(e.g., Blood & Hulin, 1967; Hulin, 1971;Hackman & Oldham, 1974; Hulin & Blood,1968; Lawler, Hackman, Si Kaufman, 1973;Turner & Lawrence, 196S; Wanous, 1973).

In 1971 Hackman and Lawler set forth aconceptual model to aid in answering thesequestions. They specified the conditions un-der which jobs would facilitate the develop-ment of internal motivation for effective per-formance and described 13 different telephonecompany jobs on four core dimensionsvari-

Requests for reprints should be sent to Arthur P.Brief, College of Business and Economics, Universityof Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40506.

ety, autonomy, task identity, and feedback."Variety" indicated the degree to which thejob required employees to perform a widerange of operations in their work and/or thedegree to which employees had to use avariety of equipment and procedures in theirwork. "Autonomy" referred to the extent towhich employees had a major say in schedul-ing their work, selecting the equipment theywould use, and deciding on procedures to befollowed. "Task identity" referred to theextent to which employees did an entire orwhole piece of work and could clearly identifythe results of their efforts. "Feedback" indi-cated the degree to which employees receivedinformation as they were working which re-vealed how well they were performing ontheir job. Hackman and Lawler (1971) alsomeasured the strength of desire for the satis-faction of "higher order" needs (e.g., obtain-ing feelings of accomplishment, personalgrowth). They predicted and found that whenjobs are high on the four core dimensions,employees who were desirous of higher orderneed satisfaction tended to have high motiva-tion and high job satisfaction, to be absentfrom work infrequently, and to be rated bysupervisors as doing high-quality work.

The purpose of this paper is to report theresults of a study designed to "constructively"replicate parts of Hackman and Lawler's(1971) preliminary efforts to test their con-

182

EMPLOYEE REACTIONS TO JOB CHARACTERISTICS 183

ceptualization. A constructive replication is astudy which, if successful, extends the gen-eralizability of the research after which it ismodeled, by avoiding the exact duplication ofthe first researchers' methods (Lykken, 1968),

The following propositions derived fromHackman and Lawler (1971) were investi-gated in this study:

1. The worker's perceptions of his job'score dimensions are positively related to vari-ous affective responses to his job (e.g., levelof internal work motivation, general job satis-faction, and job involvement).

2. Jobs perceived as high on all four coredimensions are associated with maximum in-ternal work motivation, general job satisfac-tion, etc,

3. Relationships between perceptions of thefour core dimensions and the worker's affec-tive responses to his job are stronger for thoseindividuals having greater higher order needstrength (desire for higher order needs) thanfor those individuals having less higher orderneed strength.

4. Workers from rural backgrounds havegreater higher order need strength than work-ers from urban backgrounds.

METHODThe subjects were 104 employees of a Division of

Corrections in a midwcstern state, occupying a vari-ety of jobs whose ultimate purpose was the rehabili-tation of inmates. The subjects were participants ina division-sponsored training program in which thedata collection was performed. The average age ofthe subjects was 41.1 years with 78% of the samplebeing male. The average length of employment withthe division was 7.1 years, and the average time onthe job being measured was 4.7 years.

This subject population was selected because of itsassumed differences from the telephone companyemployees studied by Hackman and Lawler (1971).For example, one might expect youth counselors andcorrectional officers working in a publicly operatedrehabilitation institution to differ from operatorsand cable splicers employed by a large, profit-orientedorganization, in terms of their motives for remainingon the job and/or the kinds of work accomplish-ments experienced.

MeasuresThe questionnaire completed by the subjects in-

cluded a shortened and slightly revised version ofthat used by Hackman and Lawler (1971). Thisrevised version has been used by Lawler, Hackman,and Kaufman (1973) and is reported by Hackman

TABLE 1JOB CORE DIMENSIONS : MEANS AND

STANDARD DEVIATIONS

Job core dimension

Skill varietyTask identityTask significanceAutonomyFeedback from job

M

5.624.536.134.994.63

SD

1.041.37.95

1.321.37

(1973). The job dimensions measured in the revisedversion include those originally reported by Hack-man and Lawler: skill variety (5 items with aninternal scale reliability of .62), task identity (Sitems with an internal scale reliability of .63), au-tonomy (5 items with an internal scale reliabilityof .69), and feedback from the job itself (3 itemswith an internal scale reliability of .63). The averagecorrelation between the dimensions was .38 (see Table1 for scale means and standard deviations).

Also incorporated from Hackman and Lawler'srevised questionnaire were their measures of variousaffective responses (level of internal work motiva-tion, general job satisfaction, and job involvement)and a measure of higher order need strength (re-ferred to by Hackman, 1973, as need strength mea-sure A ) .

In lieu of the specific satisfaction items investi-gated by Hackman and Lawler, the Job DescriptiveIndex (JDI) was used to measure satisfaction withpay, promotion, supervision, type of work, and thepeople on the job (Smith, Kendall, & Hulin, 1969).

TABLE 2GENERAL RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN JOB

CHARACTERISTICS AND EMPLOYEEREACTIONS

Employee reactions

Level of internalmotivation

General job satisfactionJob involvementSpecific satisfaction

WorkSupervisionCo-workersPayPromotion

Job core dimensions

Vari-ety

.26*

.31*

.35*

.37*

.19*

.16

.24*

.20*

Auton-omy

.32*

.51*

.34*

.51*

.38*

.37*

.21*

.23*

Taskidcn-tity

.06

.34*

.20*

.39*

.30*

.12

.12

.02

Feed-back

.37*

.37*

.40*

.35*

.41*

.20*

.07

.20*

* f < .05.

184 AUTHUK P. BRIEF AND RAMON J. ALDAG

TABLE 3MODERATING EFFECTS ov HIGHER ORDER NEED STRENGTH FOR TUB

EMPLOYEE REACTION-JOB CHARACTERISTICS RELATIONSHIPS

Employee reaction

i Higher order need ' [! strength j

High" Lo\vb

Variety

Level of internal work motivationGeneral job satisfactionJob involvementSpecific satisfaction


Autonomy

Level of internal \vork motivationGeneral job satisfactionJob involvementSpecific satisfaction


.47"

.47"

.42=

.63"

.28

.26

.40"

.01

.32

.53"

.39"

.62"

.23

.41'

.11-.13

.20'1

.16

.06

.09

.20

.36

.33

.28

.33d

.46"

Employee reaction

Higher order needstrength

| High" Lo\vb

Task identity

Level of internal work motivation .07General job satisfaction | .40"Job involvement ! .36Specific satisfaction |

Work .40"Supervision .37Co-workers .26Pay .31Promotion .14

Feedback



.44"

.36"

.52"

.52"

.40"

.31

.18-.15

-.06.33.15

.35"

.00-.26

.16

.17"

.46"

.36"

.30

.18

.43"

.13

.19

.37"'

a The high need-strength group is composed of those subjects whose higher order need-strength scores were in the top thirdof the need-strength score distribution.b

The low need-strength group is composed of those subjects whose higher order need-strength scores were in the bottomthird of the need-strength score distr ibution.

L Correlation is significant at /> < .05.

cl Difference between the correlations is significant at /> < .05, two-tailed test.

AnalysesFor easier comparisons between results, the data

analysis procedures used generally corresponded tothose used by Hackman and Lawler (1971).

RESULTSRelationships Between Core Dimensions andEmployee Affective Responses

Hackman and Lawler (1971) found thatan employee's perceptions of each core dimen-sion were significantly (p < .05) related tohis level of internal work motivation (f .24) , general job satisfaction (f = .31), andjob involvement ( f = . 2 0 ) . As indicated inTable 2, all of this study's correlations be-tween the same variables are also significantat the .05 level with the exception of the

correlation between task identity and internalwork motivation.

In 1971 Hackman and Lawler reportedthat their indices of satisfaction with pay,coworkers, promotion, and supervision werenot as strongly associated with the core di-mensions when compared with their satisfac-tion items focusing on the work itself. Thisstudy's results yielded the same pattern offindings utilizing the JDI (see Table 2 ) .Maximum Affective Responses

Hackman and Lawler (1971) examinedthree combination models to determine theimpact of a job being high on all four coredimensions. As stated earlier in Proposition2, Hackman and Lawler predicted that jobsperceived as high on all four core dimensions

EMPLOYEE REACTIONS TO JOB CHARACTERISTICS 185

are associated with maximum affective re-sponses. The models consisted of (a) corre-lating the unweighted sum of the core dimen-sions with each dependent variable, (b) usingthe core dimensions as independent variablesin a multiple-regression analysis predictingeach of the dependent variables, and (c)correlating the product of the four core di-mensions with each dependent variable. Fromthese analyses, the authors concluded thatthe viability of the conjunctive model speci-fied by their theory was neither supportednor refuted. The analysis of this study's datashowed that in all cases the regression modelappeared to perform marginally better thaneither of the other comparison models andtherefore tended to replicate Hackman andLawler's findings. A job high on all four coredimensions displayed the maximum associa-tions with internal work motivation, generaljob satisfaction, etc.Higher Order Need Strength

Hackman and Lawler (1971) compared therelationships between the core dimensions andeach independent variable for those subjectswhose scores fell into the top third of thehigher order need strength distribution withthose whose scores fell into the bottom thirdof the distribution. From this analysis, theyconcluded that higher order need strengthacts as a moderating variable except for rela-tionships involving task identity. The results,presented in Table 3, indicated that thisstudy's findings generally confirmed Hack-man and Lawler's (1971) conclusions, sincethe correlations are mostly in the expecteddirection. However, the lack of many signifi-cant differences between correlations and theoccurrence of several unexpected results leadto questioning of the straightforward role ofhigher order need strengths as depicted byHackman and Lawler.

To further examine -the effects of higherorder need strength, Hackman and Lawlercalculated the correlations between the prod-uct of the four core dimensions and eachindependent variable for the third of thesubjects highest in higher order need strengthand the third of the subjects lowest in higherorder need strength. Again, from their analy-sis, they concluded that a strong case was

TABLE 4MODERATING EFFECTS OF HIGHER ORDER NEED

STRENGTH FOR THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEENTHE PRODUCT OF THE IV'OUR CORE DIMENSIONS

AND EMPLOYEE REACTIONS

Employee reaction



Higher order needstrength

High"

.38"

.56-=,52C

.61'

.41

.36"

.30-.19

Low1'

.37

.54"

.40

.33

.32

.11

.34

.49'.''

a The high need-strength group is composed of those subject?

whose higher order need-strength scores were in the top thirdof the need-strength score distrihution.b

The low need-strength group is composed of those subjectswhose higher order need-strength scores were in the bottomthird of the need-strength score distribution.0

Correlation is significant at p < .05.11 Difference between the correlations is significant at p < .05,

two-tailed test.

made for the moderating effects of higherorder need strength. As shown in Table 4, thisstudy's results may again indicate a morecomplex relationship.Urban-Rural Background

Hackman and Lawler (1971) found thatworkers with rural backgrounds had greaterhigher order need strength than workers fromurban backgrounds (p < .10). The differencefound in this study between urban and ruralhigher order need strengths was in the pre-dicted direction, but not statistically signifi-cant, t (102) = .25.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONSThis study provides strong support for the

presence of positive associations between aworker's perceptions of his job's character-istics and his affective responses to that job.However, some questions are raised in regardto how higher order need strength moderatesthese relationships. Individuals high in higherorder need strength display stronger relation-ships between the core job dimensions andaffective responses involving the work itselfthan do individuals lower in higher order needstrength. Yet, individuals lower in higher

186 ARTHUR P. BRIEF AND RAMON J. ALDAG

order need strength display stronger relation-ships between the core job dimensions andaffective responses more extrinsic to the workitself (e.g., promotion) than do individualshigh in higher order need strength. Adequateinterpretation of these findings would appearto require data bearing on the relationshipbetween higher order and lower order needstrength and on the extent to which levels ofextrinsic rewards vary as a function of thecore dimensions.

In conclusion, there is a need for fu tureconstructive replications which continue tosample different types of jobs and to use dif-ferent instrumentation. In addition, differentmethods of statistical analysis such as thoseoutlined by Cohen (1968) appear warrantedfor the examination of interaction effectsamong the core dimensions.

REFERENCESBlauner, R. Alienation and freedom, Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 1964.Blood, M. R., & Hulin, C. L. Alienation, environ-

mental characteristics, and worker responses. Jour-nal of Applied Psychology, 1967, 51, 284-290.

Cohen, J. Multiple regression as a general data-analytic system. Psychological Bulletin, 1968, 70,426-443.

Ford, R. N. Motivation through the work itself.New York: American Management Association,1969.

Guest, R. H. Men and machines: An assembly-lineworker looks at his job. Personnel, 1955, 31, 3-10.

Hackman, J. R. Scoring key jor the Yale Job In-ventory. New Haven: Yale University Departmentof Administrative Sciences, 1973.

Hackman, J. R., & Lawler, E. E. Employee reac-tions to job characteristics. Journal of AppliedPsychology Monograph, 1971, jj, 259-286.

Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. The job diag-nostic survey: An instrument for the diagnosis ofjobs and the evaluation of redesign projects. NewHaven: Yale University Department of Admini-strative Sciences, 1974.

Hulin, C. L. Individual differences and job enrich-mentThe case against general treatment. In J.Maher (Ed.) , New perspectives in job enrichment.New York: Van Nostrand-Reinhold, 1971.

Hulin, C. L., & Blood, M. R. Job enlargement, indi-vidual differences, and worker responses. Psycho-logical Bulletin, 1968, 69, 41-55.

Lawler, E. E. Job design and employee motivation.Personnel Psychology, 1969, 22, 426-435.

Lawler, E. E., Hackman, J. R., & Kaufman, S. Ef-fects of job redesign: A field experiment. Journalof Applied Social Psychology, 1973, 3, 49-62.

Lykken, D. T. Statistical significance in psychologi-cal research. Psychological Bulletin, 1968, 70, 151-159.

Sheppard, H. L., & Herrick, N. Where have all therobots gone? New York: Free Press, 1972.

Smith, P., Kendall, L., & Hulin, C. The measure ofsatisfaction in work and retirement. Chicago:Rand-McNally, 1969.

Turner, A. N., & Lawrence, P. R. Industrial jobsand the worker. Boston: Harvard UniversityGraduate School of Business Administration, 1965.

Walker, C. R. The problem of the repetitive job.Harvard Business Review, 1950, 28, 54-58.

Walker, C. R., & Guest, R. P. The man on the as-sembly line. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1952,

Wanous, J. P. Individual differences and employeereactions to job characteristics. Proceedings of theSlst Annual Convention of the American Psycho-logical Association, 1973, S, 599-600. (Summary)

(Received July 15, 1974)

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Brief & Aldag Job Characteristics & JS