Date of Award

12-2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Patrick D. Converse

Second Advisor

Gary Burns

Third Advisor

Richard L. Griffith

Fourth Advisor

Keiron Hylton

Abstract

Researchers have been calling for greater exploration of the relationship between work values and job performance for about five decades (Goodale, 1973; J.-I. C. Hansen & Wiernik, 2017). The current study integrates research on the relationship between work values and job performance over the course of those five decades to better understand this connection. First, a thorough review of work values is presented, including a discussion of their nature, antecedences, construct clarification (how they differ from other individual differences), construct specification (how they differ from other value-based constructs), operationalization, taxonomy, measurement, group differences, stability, and outcomes. This review also includes an expanded discussion of theoretical perspectives supporting work values as a predictor of job performance. Second, a meta-analysis is presented to summarize the predictive validity of work values for job performance taking into consideration different operationalization

of both constructs in addition to the effects of different study characteristics. This included examining multiple moderators, such as job performance type (task, contextual or OCB), job performance assessment (subjective, objective), job performance information source (organization, supervisor, peer, self), work values measurement (rating, ranking), work values type (independent work values, work values congruency), work values congruence operationalization (person-organization fit, person-supervisor fit, person-group fit, person job fit), work values congruence type (direct, indirect), work values congruence assessment (perceived fit, subjective fit, objective fit), study type (cross-sectional, longitudinal), and publication status (published, unpublished). Based on the results from 65 studies (77 samples) involving 22,681 participants and 257 effect sizes, the mean corrected operational validity of work values in predicting job performance is .26 for all the studies, and .28 for rating-based studies. This represents a positive relationship between work values and job performance that is moderate to relatively large in magnitude and is in line with other prominent predictors of job performance (Sackett et al., 2021). The results of this meta-analysis highlight the potential value of adding work values to selection systems and suggest that researchers and practitioners should focus more attention on the nature and implications of work values in organizational settings.

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