Date of Award

Summer 1990

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

Program/Concentration

Industrial/Organizational Psychology

Committee Director

Raymond Kirby

Committee Member

Glynn D. Coates

Committee Member

Donald D. Davis

Committee Member

Terry L. Dickinson

Committee Member

Louis G. Tornatzky

Abstract

In order to predict behavior in organizations, it is important to understand and to consider both the individual employee and his/her interaction with the physical work environment. The main purpose of this research was to gather evidence of the validity of the Human Factors Satisfaction Questionnaire (HFSQ) in order to provide a tool with which employees' preceptions of several elements of their physical work environments can be measured. The physical work environment and its relationship to both organization theory and motivation theory is discussed. Evidence of the construct validity of the HFSQ was sought through the administration of the HFSQ to 641 employees of 8 organizations, along with established measures of job satisfaction, organization commitment, turnover intentions, participation in goal setting, feedback in goal effort, perceived crowding, task privacy, and communications privacy. Hypotheses 1 and 2 stated that the HFSQ would converge with measures of peoples' perceptions of their objective physical work environment and discriminate from other measures. These expectations were contradicted by the correlational data. However, when the HFSQ was considered to be a measure of the "physical work environment satisfaction" construct, it was seen to converge with other measures of job satisfaction and to be less strongly related to non-satisfaction measures. Hypothesis 3 stated that the HFSQ would be a significant contributor to the model illustrating the relationships between the job satisfaction, organization commitment, and turnover intention constructs, and that the model would "fit" better with the HFSQ than without it. The investigation of the job satisfaction construct measurement model provided evidence of the validity of the "physical work environment satisfaction" construct and of the HFSQ as a measure of that construct, while the data provided support for Hypothesis 3. Finally, it was expected (Hypothesis 4) that groups of people who worked in distinct physical environments would report significantly different HFSQ scores. This hypothesis received no support. Therefore, the study provided mixed evidence for the construct validity of the HFSQ and for the "physical work environment satisfaction" construct.

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DOI

10.25777/t41k-df36

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