Job performance, job satisfaction, and stress : a reasonable "fit"

The present study was designed to extend the Personal Construct Theory of George Kelly (1956) to analysis of issues involving person-environment interaction. The specific issue of focus was the notion of "best fit" of person to environment as referred to by Pervin (1968) and Jahoda (1961). It was anticipated that to the extent that a person was around people in his work context whom he perceived as possessing qualities representative of his ideal qualities, his job performance and job satisfaction should increase and job-related stress should decrease. To the extent that a person worked with people possessing qualities he did not like or found personally threatening, his job performance and job satisfaction would be expected to decrease and his job-related stress increase. Further, an optimal complex organizational structure was expected to be most facilitative in contributing to increased job performance and job satisfaction and decreased job-related stress. An adaptation of Kelly's Role Repertory Test was used to assess both the complexity of a person's cognitive organization of constructs as well as the degree to which he saw himself as compatible with important others in his work environment. The Job Description Inventory (Smith, 1969) was employed to measure Job Satisfaction and MMPI scales including A for situational stress, R for long stress and Es for personal flexibility were used to index job-related stress. Independent ratings of performance were completed by the supervisors of the officers in the study. A standard rating form (Havis, 1978), comprised of nine subscales, designed specifically for the needs of the police force studied was employed as the measure of job performance. The subjects in this study included 19 of 20 regular officers who had been employed for at least one year on the University of Houston Police Force. The subjects included six women and 13 men ranging in age from 21 to 60+ years of age. The Role Repertory Test was factor analyzed to obtain construct dimensions accounting for the greatest variance. Those constructs most highly correlated and which best distinguished the person and his value poles were used in constructing a unidimensional analysis. The latter analysis provided distinction of facilitative from non-facilitative persons in the subject’s work environment. These data were correlated with the individual measures of job performance, job satisfaction and job-related stress. [...]