The Influence of Models' Attitudes on Observers' Judgments about Task Characteristics.

摘要

The importance of social influences on workers' perceptions of seemingly objective organizational and task characteristics has recently been suggested by organizational behavior researchers. In a laboratory setting this study examined the effects of workers' awareness of other workers' (models') general job attitudes on individual judgments of the motivating potential of tasks. Results showed that subjects' task related judgments were significantly influenced by the general attitudes of other workers. Additionally, attitudes of coworker models were significantly more influential among field dependent subjects than among field independent subjects and affected the task judgments of low but not high self esteem subjects. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of information provided by coworker models on workers' attempts to structure organizational experiences, factors which might influence the weight given to socially provided information and the problems associated with using perceptual measures of organizational characteristics. (Author)