The Effect of Job Complexity on Job Satisfaction: Evidence From Turnover and Absenteeism

Andrew Weiss

No 1597, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Usinga detailed sample of semi-skilled production workers we find that holding a wide range of personal and job-related characteristics constant, workers assigned to more complex jobs seem to be more likely to quit than are workers assigned to simpler jobs. Job complexity has no discernible effect on absenteeism. Matching better educated workers to more complex jobs affects neither absenteeism nor quit propensity. Thus it appears that experimental evidence suggesting that job enlargement increases worker satisfaction is likely to stem from the experimental design: asking for volunteers to be assigned more complex jobs, and improving the quality of supervision for workers assigned to more complex jobs.

Date: 1985-04
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w1597.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:1597

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w1597

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().