The definition and measurement of job involvement.

Abstract

Job involvement is tile degree to wliiclr a person is itlentifietl pv;ycliologicaliy with his work, or the importance of work in his total self-image. Very little is presently known about this class of job attitudes, although speculations almui. it are implicit in mucli ol the work on industrial motivation, especj:llly th:it which deals with "participation." The purpose oE the present research .rv;is to define job involvement, develop a scale for measuring it, gather evidence on the reliability and validity of the scale, and lo learn something about the nature of job involvement. through its correlation with other job att.ituclcs. This paper describes the tlcvelopmcnt. and validation of a scale measuring job involvement; the resulting scales are presented, and the relation between job involvement and other job atlitudes is discussed, 1 This research was supporled by f u ~~d s from the Ford Foundatioii administered by the Graduate School of Busincss and Public Administration, Cornell University. thought. These activities and thoughtways, in turn, have their origins, for any given person, in social cxpcrience [Duhin, 1061, pp. 51 52 1.

Concept redundancy and contamination in employee commitment research: Current problems and future directions

“…Cases in point are the definitions of organisational commitment by Allen and Meyer (1990), Cook and Wall (1980), Mowday et al (1979), and Porter, Steers, Mowday and Boulian (1974). When job involvement is more closely examined, one finds different definitions by Allport (1943) Lodahl and Kejner (1965), Pinder (1984) and Reitz and Jewell (1979). The same argument is applied in the case of work involvement when the definitions by Jans (1982), Kanungo (1982a), and Newton and Keenan (1983) are revisited.…”

“…This may result in construct contamination with other measures that tap into the same manifest behaviours such as job satisfaction, job dissatisfaction or even positive and negative affectivity. Also, many measures (Lodahl & Kejner, 1965;Patchen, 1965) contain items that refer to consequential conditions or behaviours of commitment. This may result in construct contamination with other measures that tap into the same manifest behaviours such as job satisfaction, negative affectivity, organisational citizenship, tardiness, absenteeism and intention to leave.…”

“…Many measures (Lodahl & Kejner, 1965;Saleh & Hosek, 1976) contain items that refer to antecedent conditions or behaviours of commitment. This may result in construct contamination with other measures that tap into the same manifest behaviours such as job satisfaction, job dissatisfaction or even positive and negative affectivity.…”

“…The behavioural approach to commitment (Becker, 1960;Lodahl & Kejner, 1965) identified a number of commitment behaviours in the work context. Terms such as, 'investments' and 'side-bets', were used to describe some commitment behaviours.…”

How green is my firm? Workers' attitudes and behaviors towards job in environmentally-related firms

“…Job involvement, originally defined by Lodahl and Kejner (1965) as the "degree to which a person is psychologically identified with his work," has frequently been measured on a scale constructed from a list of items. Because we cannot construct a classic job involvement scale, we choose to capture two psychological and behavioral dimensions of job involvement and employee effort.…”