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Selecting Information on Job Content or Job Context: The Moderating Effect of One's Own Epistemic Authority
Author(s) -
Ellis Shmuel
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1996.tb00090.x
Subject(s) - job attitude , psychology , job characteristic theory , job performance , job analysis , context (archaeology) , job design , social psychology , preference , personnel psychology , content (measure theory) , job rotation , job shadow , job satisfaction , applied psychology , mathematics , statistics , paleontology , mathematical analysis , biology
The study investigated the effect of self‐ascribed epistemic authority (SAEA) on proclivity to choose information either about job content or about job context. Subjects expressed their attitudes toward a job offer on the basis of information either about job content alone or about job content and job context. It was found that in the process of evaluating a job offer, people with different levels of SAEA tended to focus on different kinds of information‐job‐content or job‐context characteristics. The higher the SAEA, the greater was the effect of job‐content characteristics on their evaluation of the job offer. By contrast, when the job‐content characteristics were supplemented with attractive job‐context characteristics, the relationship between SAEA and job‐offer evaluation was low and insignificant. Subjects low on SAEA had relatively low preference for using job‐content characteristics as criteria for job‐offer evaluation.