Structural Relationships, Job Characteristics, and Worker Satisfaction and Performance

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . This research is based in part on a Ph.D. dissertation completed by the author while a student at the University of Illinois. The author wishes to express his deep appreciation to his committee, Greg Oldham (Chairman), Michael Moch, and Charles Hulin. Hank Sims and Denise Rousseau also provided helpful comments on an earlier draft. This research investigates the role of job characteristics as possible mediating variables in the relationships between the organization's structural context and the attitudes and behaviors of individual employees. The organization is conceptualized as a network of task positions interrelated on the basis of workflow transactions. Three structural relationships of task positions are investigated: (1) the centrality of a task position; (2) the degree to which a task position is critical to the workflow; and (3) the transaction alternatives availableto a task position. The results indicate significant relationships between these three relational measures and job characteristics. Further, the findings support the hypothesis that job characteristics mediate the relationship between structure and individual responses.While a great deal of research has been devoted to remedying the problems associated with over-simplified, boring work, most of the approaches have focused exclusively on the individual worker and the content of his or her work. This "one person-one task" approach to job redesign has virtually ignored the structural organization in which tasks and workers are embedded. Only recently, researchers interested in bridging the traditional micro-macro gap in organizational behavior and theory have begun to view the characteristics of jobs as possible links between the organizational context and individual responses. For example, Rousseau (Rousseau, 1977(Rousseau, , 1978a(Rousseau, , 1978b Sutton and Rousseau, 1979) found that job characteristics mediate the relationships of organizational, departmental, positional, and even environmental characteristics to individual responses.The notion that organizational context may impact on job characteristics is not a new one. Several researchers have noted empirically the links between organizational attributes and job characteristics, and some have suggested a theoretical rationale to explain these relationships. In an extensive review of this literature, Jones and James (1979) summarized this research in terms of three broad categories. The first category concerned the relationships between technologies and job characteristics. In general, researchers have hypothesized that more complex, uncertain, or nonroutine technologies will be associated with higher levels of task variety, autonomy, challenge, and...

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