The Dispositional Approach To Job Attitudes: A Lifetime Longitudinal Test

TLDR

Debates between job enrichment and social‑information‑processing perspectives have shifted organizational research toward situationalism. The study advocates a dispositional approach that emphasizes the individual's role in shaping job attitudes. The authors employed a longitudinal design, measuring affective dispositions from adolescence to predict later‑life job attitudes. Dispositional measures significantly predicted job attitudes across nearly fifty years, informing both theory and organizational development practice. Supported by NIH grant AG 4178 and a UC faculty research grant; correspondence to Barry M.

Abstract

This research was supported in part by grant AG 4178 from the National Institute of Aging to the Institute of Human Development (John Clausen, principal investigator) and by a University of California faculty research grant to Barry Staw. Correspondence regarding this paper should be sent to Barry M. Staw, School of Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. Recent debates between the job enrichment and socialinformation-processing perspectives have led to a trend toward greater situationalism in organizational research. This paper, however, argues for a more dispositional approach in which the role of the person is emphasized. Using a longitudinal sample, measures of affective disposition from as early as adolescence were used to predict job attitudes in later life. Results showed that dispositional measures significantly predicted job attitudes over a time span of nearly fifty years. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of both theories of job attitudes and organizational development activities that attempt to alter employee job satisfactions