Judgments about work: Dimensionality revisited

The authors examine the measurement structure of individuals' orientations toward work rewards, or judgments about work, a concept central to the social psychology of work. Despite extensive and sustained interest in the level of importance attached to work rewards by major markers of social location such as birth cohort, social class origins, and gender, prior studies have not examined whether the same classification schema captures the underlying variation in judgments about work across these axes of social location. Drawing on five data sets, the authors examine the fit of models corresponding to the recently revived entrepreneurialbureaucratic classification schema with those corresponding to the dominant extrinsicintrinsic classification schema across subgroups of the population using confirmatory factor analysis. Findings offer only limited support for reconceptualizing judgments about work along entrepreneurialbureaucratic dimensions but call for additional research on the dimensions of judgments about work that emerge under distinct conditions and across different groups.