Employees’ Predispositions to Routinised Work: Measurement Issues

We dream of a job that makes us most productive, comfortable and satisfied. But often we focus on salary, job status and ignore the mismatch between job requirements and our psychophysiological predisposition. In the long run can pay the high costs of the mismatch, so the measurement of employees’ psychophysiological predispositions is a crucial problem. In the first part of the paper we examine the definition of basic concepts: the job’s predisposition and degree of work routinization. The second part of the paper addresses the problems of questionnaire measurement on example of 3 questionnaires: NEOFFI, SSA, Gallup’s Clifton StrengthsFinder Assessment. In the empirical part we present the results of measurement of the 2 predispositions (METICULOUSNESS and ADAPTABILITY) important for prediction psychophysiological costs in performing the highly routinized work. The analyses of the data (N = 1132 employees of different corporations + 4748 colleagues of theirs) have shown: (1) the necessity of eliminating distortions related to the response style by data ipsatization; (2) the significant differences in ADAPTABILITY and METICULOUSNESS between self vs. other -descriptions; (3) the negative relationship between ADAPTABILITY and METICULOUSNESS scores