نا هنجاری درونی ارزش پاداش کار و رضایت از کار در میان دوران جوانی بزرگسالان.

Previous research suggests that discrepancies between work values and rewards are indicators of dissonance that induce change in both to reduce such dissonance over time. The present study elaborates this model to suggest parallels with the first phase of the extension-and-strain curve. Small discrepancies or small increases in extension are presumed to be almost unnoticeable, while increasingly large discrepancies are thought to yield exponentially increasing strain. Work satisfaction is a principal outcome of dissonance; hence, work value-reward discrepancies are predicted to diminish work satisfaction in an exponential fashion. Findings from the work and family literature, however, lead to the prediction that this curvilinear association will be moderated by gender and family roles. Using longitudinal data spanning the third decade of life, the results suggest that intrinsic work value-reward discrepancies, as predicted, are increasingly associated, in a negative curvilinear fashion, with work satisfaction. This pattern, however, differs as a function of gender and family roles. Females who established family roles exhibited the expected pattern while other gender by family status groups did not. The results suggest that gender and family roles moderate the association between intrinsic work value-reward dissonance and satisfaction. In addition, women who remained unmarried and childless exhibited the strongest associations between occupational rewards and satisfaction.

This paper elaborates a model of the work value system, which posits that the discrepancy between work values and work rewards influences the salience of both values and behavior over time (Porfeli, 2007, Porfeli, 2008 and Porfeli and Vondracek, 2007). In this paper, the relationship between intrinsic work value–reward discrepancies and work satisfaction is tested using longitudinal data at two occasions spanning the third decade of life. During this period of life, families are typically formed and careers are established. Intrinsic work value–reward discrepancies are presumed to become increasingly detectable and aversive in a curvilinear manner; hence, the association between these discrepancies and work satisfaction are predicted to be curvilinear as well. Once the nature of the relationship between intrinsic work value–reward discrepancy and satisfaction is established, the potential moderating influence of the onset of family roles on this relationship is tested. Specifically, literature suggests that males and those who are married may perceive work as being more of a duty that fulfills the needs and desires of others than as an entitlement that fulfills personal needs and desires (MOW International Research Team, 1987). Gender and the establishment of family roles may, therefore, moderate the relationship between intrinsic value–reward discrepancies and work satisfaction. The difference between what people have and want has been a topic of ongoing study inside and outside the field of vocational psychology for many years (for a review of social psychological literature, see Mortimer & Lorence, 1995). Within the field of vocational psychology, the Theory of Work Adjustment (Dawis & Lofquist, 1984) is a primary foundation of such investigation. Extensive research, typically framed within the broad concept of person-environment fit, finds that a better fit, or a smaller discrepancy between personal work orientations (e.g., interests and values) and job characteristics (e.g., job rewards and demands), is predictive of subjective satisfaction and satisfactoriness (Bizot and Goldman, 1993, Breiden et al., 2006, Bretz and Judge, 1994, Chiocchio and Frigon, 2006, Feij et al., 1999, Hesketh et al., 1992 and Rounds et al., 1987), job tenure (Bretz & Judge, 1994), and turnover intentions (Lyons & O’Brien, 2006) with some variation across subpopulations (e.g., Chiocchio and Frigon, 2006, Lyons and O’Brien, 2006 and Melchiori and Church, 1997). During the process of vocational exploration, individuals discover their own interests and abilities and their work values and preferences (Patton and Porfeli, 2007 and Zimmer-Gembeck and Mortimer, 2006). As adolescents make the transition to adulthood and acquire more intensive and stable employment, their growing understanding of what they value in work, coupled with their actual work experiences, presumably promote an increasing coordination (or association) between values and rewards (see Porfeli and Vondracek (2007) for an elaboration of this logic and a review of the pertinent literature). This process of becoming aware of one’s values and coordinating them with behaviors and rewards may be more extended in recent cohorts. As education is prolonged, individuals take longer to find a good match between their work orientations and their jobs, and to settle into stable full-time work. The extension of this highly formative period supports the utility of further study of person-environment discrepancies longitudinally, during the transition to adulthood, within the field of vocational psychology. In a closely related field, I/O Psychology generally finds that discrepancy or congruence, variously defined, is associated with job satisfaction, organizational tenure and commitment, and the intent to leave an organization (Ostroff and Judge, 2007 and Verquer et al., 2003). Argyris (1957) has been credited with bringing the concept of person-environment fit to I/O psychology (Verquer et al., 2003), but clearly such a model was beginning to take shape in Munsterberg’s work several decades earlier (Porfeli, 2009). Pertaining specifically to values, the fit (or lack of discrepancy) between personal and organizational values is associated with work satisfaction and tenure within an organization, and such value congruence tends to be a stronger predictor than other indicators of person-organization fit (Verquer et al., 2003). Outside the field of vocational psychology, Multiple Discrepancies Theory (MDT; Michalos, 1985 and Michalos, 1991) is among the most prominent in the study of life satisfaction (Beckie and Hayduk, 1997, Cohen, 2000, Jacob and Brinkerhoff, 1999 and Schulz, 1995). Michalos (1991) cites an extensive body of empirical research and theory from several literatures, including mental health, marital relationships, values, subjective well-being, education, economics, friendships, person-environment fit, and race- and sex-based equity studies to support MDT. This complex theory of discrepancies asserts that general and domain-specific life satisfaction is principally predicted by a host of perceived discrepancies with the self being the primary referent. These perceived discrepancies include those between the self and others, present and past self, present self and expected self, and between present self and what one believes s/he deserves or needs. The discrepancy between what one has and what one wants (e.g., work values and rewards) in the present moment is believed to have the greatest direct influence on satisfaction and behavior, and to exhibit a negative linear relationship with satisfaction. This study is a test of this assertion.

The results suggest that the association between intrinsic work value–reward dissonance and work satisfaction increases across the third decade of life and may be expressed as increasingly quadratic. This trend seems consistent with the population-level tendency for adults to seek, obtain, and become established in career-track jobs during the early 20’s; hence, the importance of intrinsic value–reward dissonance grows in strength as young adults become established workers. This general trend is, however, highly conditional on gender and family roles. Consistent with previous research on the meaning of work, the results generally suggest that gender socialization in combination with the socializing forces tied to establishing family roles may contribute to defining work as a means of supporting others more than as a means of satisfying personal values. As the groups progressed through their 20’s, males and the group who established family roles exhibited a much weaker association between intrinsic work rewards and satisfaction than females and those who did not establish family roles. Consistent with research on the meaning of work, these trends suggest that the transition to family life may promote a duty-oriented view of work over a more self-gratifying view. Although gender and family roles appear to have a moderating effect on the link between intrinsic rewards and satisfaction, the combination of both reveals that one group stands out from the rest when the focus shifts to work value–reward dissonance. The discrepancy between intrinsic values and rewards, as indicated by the interaction term in the response surface model, is a statistically significant predictor of work satisfaction for females with family roles at the end of the third decade of life. The job satisfaction of women without family roles, as well as men irrespective of their family roles, is primarily driven by their occupational rewards. This pattern is contrary to our predictions, based on the MOW study, that both men and women with family roles would see work as an obligation, and therefore be less bothered by discrepancies between the rewards obtained in the workplace and their personal values. While this may be the case for men (as demonstrated here) and for women in later phases of the life course, the situation may be different for young women in their late 20’s, who are working while also caring for young children. As a result of our sample inclusion criteria, the portion of the family roles group who had become mothers at age 28–29 would be caring for children mostly of preschool age. Though there is considerable cultural affirmation for equal occupational achievement for men and women, mothers still have primary responsibility for the care of children. For example, in the nationally-representative Monitoring the Future Study, male and female high school seniors in 1995 (about 4 years younger than the YDS cohort), were much more likely to endorse the traditional family structure (husband works full time, wife does not work) as the preferred arrangement when there are preschool children than the situation in which husbands and wives both work full time. Husbands working full-time and wives part-time was also considered highly acceptable for both genders (Johnson, Oesterle, & Mortimer, 2001). Though the small sample sizes preclude comparison of the effects of full-time versus part-time employment, it could be that working mothers of very young children are particularly bothered by the lack of satisfaction of their intrinsic values given the sacrifices they are making at home to go to work. Though we would prefer to compare married women to married and unmarried mothers and married mothers to single mothers, who are subject to different economic pressures to work, the size of the sample also made such fine-tuned investigation impossible. On a more general level, these results suggest that increasingly large discrepancies between values and rewards may be associated with some acceleration in the decline in satisfaction for certain types of workers. On the basis of our analyses, females appear to be more affected by the establishment of family roles than males. This group (females with family roles) was the only one to manifest a consistent increase in the link between value–reward discrepancies and satisfaction over time. The establishment and maintenance of family roles may act as a destabilizing force as it pertains to the link between the satisfaction of work values and work satisfaction broadly. Given that females generally feel a greater pull away from work and toward family relative to males, this result seems to further support the conditioning effect of family roles on the link between work value–reward dissonance and satisfaction. Although interesting, these results and interpretation pertaining to women with family roles should be treated with caution given that only two occasions are being used to demonstrate possible quadratic changes in the target relationship over time and the fairly small size of this portion of the sample. While general trends and sub-group comparisons across the simple, residualized, and response surface discrepancy score approaches yielded similar patterns for the groups across time, there were a few notable exceptions. The r2 estimates were generally higher for the response surface approach relative to the other two. This approach also revealed that intrinsic work rewards are the only significant predictor of satisfaction until age 28–29, and at this age, it remains the strongest predictor of satisfaction. These patterns suggest that young adults may employ other criteria aside from personal work values when considering what constitutes more or less of a reward. Michalos (1991) suggested a broad array of criteria that people employ when considering their relative work rewards. Future research could examine the relative predictive power of discrepancies between work rewards and personal values, what others receive, what one expects to receive now or in the future, and/or what one deserves. Theory generally asserts that discrepancies have a meaningful influence on satisfaction ( Dawis and Lofquist, 1984, Michalos, 1985 and Michalos, 1991), but this study finds that this is mainly true for values as the referent during the later 20’s and leaves open the question as to what, if any, criteria are employed to define discrepancies from obtained rewards before that time. On a very broad level, the response surface results for the second occasion suggest that notions of value–reward consonance (an example of occupational fit) and dissonance (an example of occupational misfit) may need revision. Dissonance of the surplus kind appears to be linked to greater job satisfaction than equivalent levels of dissonance on the deficit side of the contour. These dissonance indicators point to a possible threshold effect, whereby a person is generally satisfied with their work when they are at least meeting their values and increasingly satisfied up to a moderate surplus. More is better up to a point. The pattern of satisfaction along the consonance axis suggests that consonance as a result of high levels of values and rewards is associated with greater satisfaction than consonance born from low levels of each. There are probably several reasonable explanations for this phenomenon. One is that people who exhibit low levels of intrinsic values and rewards may have settled for their lot in life rather than having sought out a work situation to satisfy low levels of intrinsic work rewards. In contrast, people who highly value intrinsic rewards may be more apt to seek out work that offers more intrinsic rewards. Future research should be conducted to test the proposed model of work-value dissonance and consider the implications of this model as it pertains to more general theories of occupation fit.