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Introduction
Low job satisfaction of employees has an adverse impact on organizations in many ways. Among these are poor health, complaining, damaging equipment, high absenteeism (Scott and Taylor, 1985), and high turnover (Lee and Mowday, 1987). The cost of high turnover alone can be substantial. It often costs an employer $5,000 or more to hire and train a replacement for an hourly worker who has quit, and the cost is much higher for higher level jobs (Dumain, 1987).
Many different factors have been found to affect job satisfaction. Among the factors that have often been studied are working conditions, supervision, and pay. A factor that has not traditionally been considered is the fit between an employee's thinking style and the nature of the tasks performed on a job. Some people have a thinking style that fits well with a clearly defined job that demands precision, reliability, and conformity to rules. Other people have a quite different thinking style--one that is more open, but less precise. Their thinking style fits better with a loosely defined job that requires creativity. When people end up in jobs for which they are ill suited frustration and low satisfaction are likely results. A framework for understanding individual thinking styles and a way to measure these styles were developed by Michael Kirton. His adaption-innovation theory (Kirton, 1976) postulates two very different thinking styles that anchor the ends of a continuum. He states that some individuals are highly reliable and not easily bored by repetitive tasks. They are comfortable with rules, good at repetitive tasks, and like well-defined job expectations. But they are not good at coming up with new ideas that break with tradition or at dealing with unstructured situations. Other individuals have a very different thinking style. They are easily bored with repetitive tasks, are broadly imaginative, and function effectively in unstructured situations. Kirton labels individuals who readily accept rules "adaptors" because they adapt well to existing situations. He labels those who are less rule-governed and more open-thinking "innovators" because they are adept at developing new ideas in unstructured situations (Kirton, 1976). Selected characteristics of these two thinking-style types are shown in Table 1. (Table 1 omitted)
It seems reasonable to assume that individuals are attracted to jobs that fit...