Date of Award

2015

Degree Type

Thesis

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Horvath, Michael

Subject Headings

Job analysis, Human information processing, Work -- Psychological aspects, Personnel management -- Psychological aspects, Organizational behavior -- Evaluation, Psychology motivation job analysis information processing

Abstract

Accuracy of the output resulting from a job analysis is of utmost importance to practitioners and human resource professionals. Without this accuracy, many of the organizational actions that follow can be prone to failure. One of the notable sources of inaccuracy in job analysis is motivation. Evidence of motivation as a source of inaccuracy in job analysis comes from findings which have been largely adapted from cognitive and social psychology literature. To bridge the gap more directly, this study examined how different variables such as self-efficacy, need for cognition, job complexity, and job analysis purpose impacted the relationship between information processing strategies and perceived motivation in the context of a job analysis. Through a survey posted on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, 198 respondents were asked to rate how motivated they would be to accurately complete a job analysis for their own job with various situational conditions. Additionally, the present study examined how these information processing strategies influenced perceived task difficulty. By using a sample entirely made up of job incumbents, this research was able to further examine the within group variation in preference for using either of the information processing strategies. Data analyses revealed a few key takeaways from this study. First, respondents were more motivated in the holistic strategy condition and saw it as less difficult than the decomposed strategy. Additionally, respondents were not equally motivated across the three job analysis purposes presented, with determining employee compensation as the most motivating condition. The findings from this study can help aid practitioners' awareness of the effects varying information processing strategies may have on the motivation of their raters and subsequently, the accuracy of the results

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