The Protestant Ethic as a personality variable.

Concept Redundancy in Organizational Research: The Case of Work Commitment

“…No attempt was made to incorporate classic or case-oriented literature embracing work commitment-for example, Dalton (1959). Concepts representative of these foci include: Protestant work ethic endorsement (Blood, 1969;Mirels & Garrett, 1971); career salience (Greenhaus, 1971); job involvement (Lodahl & Kejner, 1965); work as a central life interest (Dubin, 1956); organizational commitment (Mowday et al, 1979); and union commitment (Gordon et al, 1980 Table 1 are intended to structure a review that will highlight similarities and differences in work commitment concepts. Each form of commitment is analyzed on the basis of: (a) how the concept's definition and its measure are related to each other, to other forms of work commitment, and to other types of commitment (e.g., family, religious, civic); …”

“…Protestant work ethic endorsement is defined similarly by Blood (1969) and Mirels and Garrett (1971). The essence of this concept (only the measures differ) is the belief that hard work is intrinsically good and an end in itself.…”

“…Most items seem to correspond to the conceptual definition, but the nonProtestant measure contains one item that appears to overlap with the career salience and/or job involvement forms of work commitment (i.e., "The principal purpose of a man's job is to provide him with the means for enjoying his free time"). Similarly, 1 item of the 19-item Mirels and Garrett (1971) measure (i.e., "There are few satisfactions equal to the realization that one has done his best at a job") could be said to be redundant with work as a central life interest. Contrary to Kidron (1978), this overlap is not held to be problematic.…”

“…As indicated in Table 1, evaluations of epistemic correlations ranged from poor (Lodahl & Kejner, 1965) to good (Mirels & Garrett, 1971;CLI;organizational commitment). In the case of career salience, a reformulation of the definition was suggested.…”

Religious orientation, mental health and culture: conceptual and empirical perspectives

“…Scales developed by Allport and Ross (1967) Feagin (1964) alongside the Protestant Work Ethic measure proposed by Mirels and Garrett (1971) among 121 students at a small American University and 260 students at an English university in order to examine the association between intrinsic religiosity and the Protestant work ethic. The data suggested that intrinsic religiosity and the Protestant work ethic are significantly correlated, and that this correlation remains significant even after partialling out their common correlation with the tendency to describe oneself as politically conservative.…”