Adaptability in the workplace: development of a taxonomy of adaptive performance.

The purpose of this research was to develop a taxonomy of adaptive job performance and examine the implications of this taxonomy for understanding, predicting, and training adaptive behavior in work settings. Two studies were conducted to address this issue. In Study 1, over 1,000 critical incidents from 21 different jobs were content analyzed to identify an 8-dimension taxonomy of adaptive performance. Study 2 reports the development and administration of an instrument, the Job Adaptability Inventory, that was used to empirically examine the proposed taxonomy in 24 different jobs. Exploratory factor analyses using data from 1,619 respondents supported the proposed 8-dimension taxonomy from Study 1. Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses on the remainder of the sample (n = 1,715) indicated a good fit for the 8-factor model. Results and implications are discussed.

Predicting job satisfaction from life satisfaction: is there a general satisfaction factor?

Job satisfaction has been shown to be related to a number of individual and organizational effectiveness variables. Consequently, it is suggested that attempts to select individuals with inclinations towards satisfaction would be of theoretical and practical importance. For five samples of individuals representing a wide variety of occupations, regression analyses were used to assess the usefulness of life satisfaction in the prediction of subsequent job satisfaction, while statistically controlling various demographic variables, pay, tenure, and perceptions of task characteristics. In a sixth sample of workers eligible for retirement, the hypothesis that life satisfaction can be predicted from job satisfaction was also examined. The results showed that in three of the first five samples, life satisfaction was a significant predictor of job satisfaction. In the sample of retirees, significant results were also obtained using job satisfaction to predict subsequent life satisfaction. It is suggested that satisfaction may be a relatively stable and general aspect of certain individuals which is a function of particular personality characteristics and/or an inclination towards interpreting various situations in a favorable manner.

The relationship among perceptual similarity, sex, and performance ratings in manager-subordinate dyads.

The relationship of perceptual similarity and sex in both manager and subordinate performance appraisals within manager-subordinate dyads was investigated. Perceptual similarity accounted for a sizable percentage of performance rating variance. Significantly lower performance appraisals were found in dyads in which there was mutual perceptual dissimilarity between managers and subordinates.