JOB INVOLVEMENT AND WORK COMMITMENT INVESTIGATED FOR MALE AND FEMALE NURSES AND ENGINEERS (WORK PARTICIPATION)

Two terms, job involvement and work commitment, have been used interchangeably in the psychosocial research literature. Meanings of the terms range indiscriminately over belief and behavior. Commitment is defined for this study as that attitude which ties someone to a thing or an act; in the case of a worker, it ties the worker to the work setting. Involvement is a broader word which includes both commitment and participation. A questionnaire modified from a scale generated by an international consortium, the Work Importance Study, was mailed to 400 subjects chosen in equal numbers from four groups: male nurses, female nurses, male engineers, and female engineers. Subjects reported commitment and participation in relation to five types of work: organization, job, work, occupation, and career. Factor analysis showed four factors for the scale: Professional Involvement, Work Commitment, Work Participation, and Organizational Involvement. Using analysis of variance, the independent variable, sex, showed close to total chance correlation with the dependent variables originally proposed, commitment, participation, and five types of work, and with the four loaded factors. Analysis of variance for profession was significant for the four factors. Difference analysis suggested three types of work emerging in the scale: organization, work, and profession. Suggestions for further research are made, citing the possibility of building intervention strategies on the results. The new questionnaire should be administered to workers in different occupations and to unionized employees