Behavior in organizations as a function of employee's locus of control.

Abstract

Locus of control is an important variable for the explanation of human behavior in organizations . The nature of the concept, its measurement, and general evidence for its validity are discussed. Several hypotheses are presented involving the locus of control in an organizational context, and supporting evidence from applied studies is reviewed. Specifically, it is suggested that locus of control is related to motivation, effort, performance, satisfaction, perception of the job, compliance with authority, and supervisory style. Furthermore, locus of control may moderate the relation between incentives and motivation and between satisfaction and turnover. Little attention has been given to individual personality in research on job motivation and satisfaction. For the most part, the major theories in organizational psychology assume that the same basic processes account for behavior across all individuals and that situational characteristics cause predictable behavior across people.1 This article attempts to demonstrate the usefulness of personality in explaining human behavior in organizations and focuses on locus of control as it relates to behavior in organizational settings. The general theory of locus of control arose from observation and research in clinical psychology. Both the measurement and theory have been refined so that the concept is heuristically useful. Over two dozen studies of locus of control have been related specifically to attitudinal, motivational, and behavioral variables in organizational settings. One major task of this article is to integrate the general theory with the organizational findings.