Causes and Consequences of Worker Influence in Selected Decisional Domains.

Three questions are addressed: How is influence over workplace decisions obtained by organizational members? Are the relationships between perceived influence and worker affect spurious? Are nonspurious relationships moderated by worker and workplace characteristics? Each question applies to task influence and influence over the organization of work. The former pertains to how the task is done, the latter to task assignment and work schedule decisions. Questionnaire measures of perceived influence in each domain are obtained from the 1977 Quality of Employment Survey, a national survey of 1515 workers. Seven affective measures are studied. Seventeen demographic and occupational characteristics were employed in multiple regressions of each perceived influence measure. Unique effects are demonstrated for personal, occupational, and organizational status variables (e.g., age, occupational prestige, supervisory status), whereas the predictors of influence over organization of work decisions were solely characteristics of organizational position (e.g., proximity to the production flow). These results confirmed the hypothesis stating that influence over task related decisions is obtained in the context of a small decisional system, the workgroup, where sources of personal, occupational, and organizational status can contribute to one's power. Influence over the organization of work is obtained in the context of that large group of positions with which one's work activities are interdependent, and thus prestige cannot contribute to influence. Both perceived influence indices obtained independent, additive and nonspurious effects to four affect variables, including job and life satisfaction. The relationships between the influence over the organization of work and worker affect scales were not consistently moderated by any of 15 demographic and occupational variables, nor by three individual level variables investigated. The effects of task discretion upon affect variables were hypothesized and found to be greatest among workers: who see a great amount of influence over task decisions as legitimate; under heavy job dem and s; reporting the least job involvement; most likely to see work simply as a way to make a living. Effects of task discretion were also greatest among non-supervisory employees, an effect attributable to their low job involvement.PhDOccupational psychologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/158826/1/8214995.pd