Content area
Abstract
Though the characteristics of work and the context within which the work is performed appear to be important to work satisfaction and a worker's perception of the passage of time, an explanation and specification of the work, time, and satisfaction relation had not been offered. To address this deficiency, a cognitive resource model of the work, time, and satisfaction relation was proposed. According to the proposed model, as more of the worker's cognitive resources are consumed by the work and the context within which the work is being performed, fewer cognitive resources remain available for evaluative purposes. Under such conditions, other aspects of the work (e.g., the passage of time) become relatively unimportant, and the work is perceived as more satisfying. A partial test of the proposed model provided strong support. As hypothesized, though the relation between cognitive load and perception of the passage of time was positive and linear, the relation between cognitive load and work satisfaction was quadratic. As also hypothesized, under conditions of high cognitive load, higher cognitive ability workers performed their work more quickly than did their lower cognitive ability counterparts. In contrast, however, the hypothesized relation between cognitive ability and work preference was not supported. In sum, the results of this study suggest that a cognitive resource perspective may serve as a more general unifying theoretical perspective for the Job Characteristics and Social Information Processing models. Moreover, though the relation between the attentional demands of the work and a worker's perception of the passage of time is positively linear, the relation between the attentional demands of the work and worker satisfaction is curvilinear; increases in work complexity beyond some unspecified point will serve to be counterproductive.
