Invited reaction: The effects of personality, affectivity, and work commitment on motivation to improve work through learning

✍ Scribed by Rodney A. McCloy; Lauress L. Wise

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 59 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1044-8004
• DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.1039

✦ Synopsis

The research reported here was designed to explore the relationship of a relatively new work-related construct, motivation to improve work through learning (Baldwin, Ford, and Naquin, 2002), to other, more established constructs. The authors treat training motivation as a dispositional trait, a relatively stable characteristic of the individual, rather than a more transitory trait heavily influenced by situational factors.

This study is a first step in construct validation in the finest tradition of Messick (1989) in that it seeks to clarify relationships of the targeted construct to other well-established constructs, including measures of personality and work commitment. Personality measures include assessment of the five key dimensions identified from factor analytic studies (conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and extroversion; compare Hogan, 1991;Costa and McCrae, 1992) and two measures of affect (positive and negative affectivity; compare Watson, Clark, and Tellegen, 1988). The article includes a review of prior research on each of the constructs studied.

This study is essentially exploratory, even though the approach is at times described as confirmatory. The original model was modified post hoc to fit the data better (for example, dropping two of the personality factors and one affectivity factor). With a limited sample size, this increases the likelihood that the modifications (a) capitalized on idiosyncrasies present in the sample and thus (b) would not receive empirical support in a larger, more representative sample. Nonetheless, most of the first-order correlations observed were significant and in the direction hypothesized by the initial model.