Relationships between job motivation variables and interest measures

Abstract

Eight-hundred and sixty graduating high school seniors responded to 120 items of the Strong Vocational Interest Blank designed to measure six interests and revised forms of the Job Description Inventory, the Job Diagnostic Survey, and Alderfer's Existence, Relatedness, and Growth needs measures. Holland ( Making vocational choices: A theory of careers, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973 ) hypothesizes that preferences for occupations indicate personality and motivational differences among respondents. The present study was conducted to determine if people who expressed high interest in a set of occupations could be characterized by a unique set of motivations. Canonical analysis revealed that the interest measures and the job-related motivational measures were significantly related along three dimensions. The low level of common variance between the two sets of measures, however, suggests that additional information concerning a person's possible career and job satisfaction and performance may be gained by using the job motivation variables in addition to the interest measures.