Test-retest reliability of the relative work centrality measure.

The Meaning of Work International Research Team in 1987 developed the Relative Work Centrality measure, on which individuals divide 100 points among five major domains (work, leisure, community, religion, and family) in their lives, based on their relative centrality. The present study examined the test-retest reliability of this measure in a convenience sample of 96 Israeli full-time workers over a 4-wk. period. The sample consisted of 41.7% men and 58.3% women, of whom 48.9% were married. The participants had a mean age of 36.0 yr. (SD = 11.5) and a mean education of 14.9 yr. (SD = 2.5). The Spearman rank correlation coefficients for work, leisure, community, religion, and family at Time 1 and Time 2 were, respectively, .66, .76, .64, .76, and .82. These values indicate a fairly high test-retest reliability of the Relative Work Centrality measure and support the notion that this measure can also be applied to assess the relative centrality of each of the other four major life domains, in addition to work.

Work centrality and post-award work behavior of lottery winners.

Individuals who had won the lottery responded to a survey concerning whether they had continued to work after winning. They were also asked to indicate how important work was in their life using items and scales commonly used to measure work centrality. The authors predicted that whether lottery winners would continue to work would be related to their level of work centrality as well as to the amount of their winnings. Individuals who won large amounts in the lottery would be less likely to quit work if they had relatively greater degrees of work centrality. After controlling for a number of variables (i.e., age, gender, education, occupation, and job satisfaction), results indicated that work centrality and the amount won were significantly related to whether individuals continued to work and, as predicted, the interaction between the two was also significantly related to work continuance.

To work or not to work: nonfinancial employment commitment and the social desirability bias.

The so-called "lottery question," which asks whether individuals would stop or continue working if there were no economic reasons to do so, was used to evaluate non-financial employment commitment. Data were collected through a survey conducted among a representative sample of the adult population in Israel. The sample included 501 respondents, who were interviewed via telephone in their homes by professional interviewers from a national survey agency. The additional contribution of social desirability to the prediction of nonfinancial employment commitment, beyond the contribution of age, is significant. There is a higher likelihood of indicating a desire to continue working under conditions of high social desirability rather than under those of low social desirability. It is suggested that, in order to examine the actual scope of nonfinancial employment commitment, some measures of detecting or reducing the social desirability bias should be taken.