Job scope relationships: A three‐wave longitudinal analysis

Abstract

Managers, as well as researchers, have been concerned with the effects of task design upon employee satisfaction for several reasons. First, there has been the concern that poorly-designed tasks may result in job dissatisfaction, which in turn, may adversely affect productivity. While this concern has been weakly supported at best in the literature, dissatisfaction may lead to other dysfunctional behaviour, such as increased grievances or lower quality of work. A majority of past research on job enrichment and job characteristics has tended to be focused upon blue-collar workers. This has been due, in part, to the assumption that the routine industrial task, such as an assembly line job, results in boredom and job dissatisfaction. Alternatively, it has not been demonstrated in the literature that white-collar and/or management positions necessarily result in higher levels of job satisfaction. Hence, the effects of task design upon employee satisfaction is a research issue of importance to managers in all types of organizations and at all levels within a given organization. This research focused on longitudinal relationships between job scope and satisfaction and performance. Recent years have seen an increasing volume of cross-sectional research which suggests that jobs with increased scope are associated with higher levels of satisfaction with the work itself. This result has been found across a wide variety of samples and research instruments for the different job characteristic dimensions (Brief and Aldag, 1975; Champoux, 1975; Hackman and Lawler, 1971; Hackman and Oldham, 1975; Rousseau, 1977; Sims and Szilagyi, 1976) as well as for various measures of job scope (Champoux, 1975; Hackman and Lawler, 1971; Hackman and Oldham, 1975; Oldham, Hackman, and Pearce, 1976; Stone, 1975, 1976; Stone, Mowday, and Porter, 1977). In some of these studies, lower but statistically significant relationships between job characteristic dimensions or job scope and contextual satisfaction (e.g., pay, security, promotion, co-workers, etc.) have also been reported (Brief and Aldag, 1975; Champoux, 1975; Hackman and Lawler,