Hackman and Oldham’s JCM (Job Characterisitics Model) was also found not to be
appropriate for this research. It does not have a leadership element and, while
some of the Core Job Dimensions and the Experienced Meaningfulness construct
are of interest, the JDS (Job Diagnostic Survey) contains too many items to
practically complement the existing constructs that have been identifed for use in
this research. Put simply, at 13 pages in length, the JDS is too big!
Nevertheless, the JDS was examined to gain insights into ways of operationalising
the Work Meaning construct for this research. A critical examination of the
methods of measurement for the original Experienced Meaningfulness construct in
the Job Diagnostic Survey (Hackman and Oldham 1974) revealed, however, that
the original construct is somewhat lacking in substantive content. The
Experienced Meaningfulness of the Work construct is defined by Hackman and
Oldham as:
The degree to which the individual experiences the job as one which is
generally meaningful, valuable, and worthwhile
(Hackman and Oldham 1976: 256)Experienced Meaningfulness is measured using the following two items in the Job
Diagnostic Survey (Hackman and Oldham 1974: 62):
Section 3 item 4: Most of the things I have to do on this job are useless
and trivial (reverse coding)
Section 3 item 7: The work I do on this job is very meaningful to me
The same statements are included again in Section 5 of the JDS but reworded to
evaluate how respondents believe their co-workers feel about their jobs.
Although the description of the construct in Hackman and Oldham (1976: 256)
talks about meaningful, valuable, and worthwhile, the items that operationalise
this construct simply use ‘meaningful’ in a somewhat unsubstantiated way, not
going any further than constrasting ‘meaningfulness’ with ‘useless and trivial’.
Accordingly, a further search for alternative methods of operationalising the Work
Meaning construct were performed, along with similar searches for ways of
measuring the other constructs in the survey. Chapter 5 describes the findings
from these searches.
Reflecting Simons’ (2003: 339) observation that hospitality researchers had
tended to draw on a relatively small pool of motivational concepts (and his
recommendation that hospitality scholars consider the broader scope of work
motivation research to gain a more holistic understanding of the field), the